Endre Szemerédi has won the Abel Prize.
I have had very little contact with him, but just recently in my post on Makám I recalled the occasion when I gave a conference talk in the same time-slot as him (along with other big names Eduard Wirsing, Jaroslav Nešetřil, and Walter Hayman).
Indeed, Jarik was involved in making a film about the award of an honorary doctorate to Endre at Charles University in Prague; well worth watching, if you get the chance. Some of the photography has an old master quality to it.
And I also mentioned, not too long ago, how life followed art (in this case, the art of Stanislaw Lem) in Furstenberg’s proof of Szemerédi’s combinatorial theorem by the methods of ergodic theory.
