József Beck

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József Beck (born February 14, 1952, in Budapest, Hungary) is a Hungarian mathematician and the Harold H. Martin Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University.

Beck is known for his work in combinatorics and discrepancy theory. He helped develop important ideas such as the partial colouring lemma and the Beck–Fiala theorem, contributed to the algorithmic version of the Lovász Local Lemma, and advanced the two extremes theorem in combinatorial geometry as well as the use of the second moment method in positional games.

In 1985, Beck received the Fulkerson Prize for his paper Roth's estimate of the discrepancy of integer sequences is nearly sharp. The work introduced discrepancy for hypergraphs and gave an upper bound on the discrepancy of arithmetic progressions within the set {1, 2, ..., n}, matching the known lower bound up to a polylogarithmic factor. Later researchers Jiří Matoušek and Joel Spencer showed the bound is sharp by removing the polylog factor.

Beck gave an invited talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1986 and became an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2004.

Selected books
- Irregularities of Distribution (with William W. L. Chen), Cambridge Tracts in Mathematics 89, Cambridge University Press, 1987
- Combinatorial Games: Tic-Tac-Toe Theory, Cambridge University Press, 2008
- Inevitable Randomness in Discrete Mathematics, American Mathematical Society, 2009
- Probabilistic Diophantine Approximation: Randomness in Lattice Point Counting, Springer Monographs in Mathematics, 2014
- Strong Uniformity and Large Dynamical Systems, World Scientific Publishing, 2018