Mathematics

A native of Budapest, Hungary, Bela has been at Gettysburg College since 1993. His favorite courses to teach include Abstract Mathematics (where he uses his own book published by Springer) and Research in Mathematics (where small groups of students work on unsolved questions). He spent his sabbaticals at Cornell University (Ithaca), at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (Berkeley), and at Pomona College (Claremont). Bela has publications in a wide range of areas, including additive combinatorics, spherical geometry, lattice theory, extremal graph theory, approximation theory, and statistics. He has been supervising the research of over two hundred of his students, several of whom won national awards. 

He is the Director of American Mathematics Competitions at the MAA, where he oversees a series of annual competitions that starts with the participation of over 300,000 students and culminates in the International Mathematics Olympiad.

He is also on the Board of Pro Mathematica Arte, the organization that runs the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics and the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics Education programs.

Bela is the 2013 winner of Gettysburg College’s Excellence in Teaching Award, and the 2012 winner of the Distinguished College or University Teaching Award of the EPaDel Section of the Mathematical Association of America.

Research Interests: Algebraic and geometric combinatorics; additive number theory; finite sets.