Lajos Takács

Who is Lajos Takács?

Lajos Takács is a Hungarian mathematician, known for his contributions to probability theory and in particular, queueing theory. He wrote over two hundred scientific papers and six books.

He studied at the Technical University of Budapest, taking courses with Charles Jordan and received a Ph.D. for his dissertation On a Probability-theoretical Investigation of Brownian Motion. From 1945-48 he was a student assistant to Professor Zoltán Bay and participated in his famous experiment of receiving microwave echoes from the Moon. In 1957 he received the Academic Doctor's Degree in Mathematics for his thesis entitled "Stochastic processes arising in the theory of particle counters".

He worked as a mathematician at the Tungsram Research Laboratory, the Research Institute for Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and was an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics of the L. Eötvös University. He became one of the first to introduce semi-Markov processes in queueing theory.

He took a lecturing appointment at Imperial College in London and London School of Economics, before moving to Columbia University in New York City and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, advising over twenty Ph.D.-theses. He also held visiting appointments at Bell Labs and IBM Research, had sabbaticals at Stanford University. At present he is Professor Emeritus at Case Western Reserve University.