István Fáry (30 June 1922 – 2 November 1984) was a Hungarian-born mathematician known for his work in geometry and algebraic topology. He proved Fáry's theorem that every planar graph has a straight-line embedding in 1948, and the Fáry–Milnor theorem lower-bounding the curvature of a nontrivial knot in 1949.

Biography

Fáry was born June 30, 1922, in Gyula, Hungary. After studying for a master's degree at the University of Budapest, he moved to the University of Szeged, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1947. He then studied at the Sorbonne before taking a faculty position at the University of Montreal in 1955. He moved to the University of California, Berkeley in 1958 and became a full professor in 1962. He died on November 2, 1984, in El Cerrito, California.

Selected publications