The Béla Szőkefalvi-Nagy Medal was founded in 1999 by Erzsébet Szőkefalvi-Nagy in memory of her father Béla Szőkefalvi-Nagy, who served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Acta Scientiarum Mathematicarum from 1946 to 1981. The Medal is awarded annually by the Bolyai Institute to honour a distinguished mathematician who has published significant results in the journal.

Zsolt Páles’s research interests belong to mathematical analysis and operations research. He is a leading researcher at the international level in functional equations and inequalities. He obtained important and high-impact results related to the theory of means; generalized convexity; the regularity theory of functional equations; non-smooth analysis, optimization, and optimal control.

Among others, he solved the comparison problems, homogeneity problems, and characterizations problems for several important classes of means, thus generalizing former related results by Kolmogorov, Nagumo, and de Finetti. Concerning linear two-variable functional equations, he found a general procedure that results in an ordinary differential equation for the unknown functions. Using deep tools from real analysis, he developed essentially new methods for proving the regularity of the unknown functions in composite functional equations. He extended the concept and calculus of Clarke generalized derivative of locally Lipschitz functions from the finite-dimensional case to the case of general Banach spaces. He characterized those real functions which are perturbations of convex functions by bounded functions and Lipschitz functions. He obtained important results concerning the stability of convexity to which he created new Korovkin-type theorems.

According to MathSciNet, he is the author of 250 publications with ca. 2100 citations from close to 700 authors. Zsolt Páles has published 13 important papers in Acta Szeged which cover all areas mentioned in the first paragraph.

The official award ceremony will be held at 10:00 am on 24 February 2023 (Friday) in Bolyai Hall of the Bolyai Institute.