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'Alfréd Rényi' (March 20, 1921 – February 1, 1970) was a Hungarian mathematician who made contributions in combinatorics and graph theory but mostly in probability theory.^[1][1]
He studied at the University of Budapest, completed his PhD at the University of Szeged, and from 1949 was a professor of the University of Debrecen
He proved, using the large sieve, that there is a number $K$ such that every even number is the sum of a prime number and a number that can be written as the product of at most $K$ primes. See also Goldbach conjecture.
In information theory, he introduced the spectrum of Rényi entropies of order α, giving an important generalisation of the Shannon entropy and the Kullback-Leibler divergence. The Rényi entropies give a spectrum of useful diversity indices, and lead to a spectrum of fractal dimensions.
He founded the Mathematical Institute in Budapest, now called The Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics. There are currently approximately 70 mathematicians doing research at the Institute.
He wrote 32 joint papers with Paul Erdős,^[3] the most well-known of which are his papers introducing the Erdős-Rényi model of random graphs.^[4] Alfréd Rényi is probably the source of the quote: "A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.", which is generally ascribed to Erdős.
He is also famous for having said, "If I feel unhappy, I do mathematics to become happy. If I am happy, I do mathematics to keep happy."^[5]

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3. http://www.oakland.edu/enp/erdtrib.pdf.
4. "On random graphs", Publ. Math. Debrecen, 1959, and "On the evolution of random graphs", Publ. Math. Inst. Hung. Acad. Sci, 1960.
5. Quoted in Pál Turán, "The Work of Alfréd Rényi", Matematikai Lapok 21 (1970) 199 - 210.

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