György Elekes

Who is György Elekes?

György Elekes was a mathematician and computer scientist who specialized in Combinatorial geometry and Combinatorial set theory. He may be best known for his work in the field that would eventually be called Additive Combinatorics. Particularly notable was his "ingenious" application of the Szemerédi–Trotter theorem to improve the best known lower bound for the sum-product problem. He also proved that any polynomial-time algorithm approximating the volume of convex bodies must have a multiplicative error, and the error grows exponentially on the dimension. With Micha Sharir he set up a framework which eventually led Guth and Katz to the solution of the Erdős distinct distances problem.