Research Interests

Primary research areas are combinatorics and graph theory, and their applications to geometry, computer science and biology.

Received research support from the National Science Foundation (6+ grants), NIH, DARPA and AFORS, and fellowship support from the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, the EPSRC, and the European Union.

Wrote more than 160 papers, which are cited over 3800 times, with more than 100 collaborators, and graduated 6 Ph.D. students.

Editorial work:  "Combinatorica" (1995-, managing editor 1987-1995), "SIAM J. Discrete Math." (2003-2017),  "European J. Math"(2014-), "Central European J. Mathematics" (2009-2014);  "International Journal of Combinatorics" (2009-2017). Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1998, Russell Research Award, USC, 2007.

Education

• Candidate, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1987)
• Ph.D. in Finite Mathematics, Eotvos University, Hungary (1983)
• M.S. in mathematics, Eotvos University, Hungary (1980)

Experience

• Professor, University of South Carolina (1996 – present)
• Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, University of Bonn (2009)
• Interim Director of the Industrial Mathematics Institute, University of South Carolina (2005 – 2007)
• Visiting Fellow, NCBI/NLM/NIH (2002 – 2003)
• Director of the Institute of Mathematics I, Eotvos University (1994 – 1996)
• Visiting Associate Professor, University of New Mexico (1992 – 1993)
• Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, University of Bonn (1991 – 1992)
• Visiting Associate Professor, University of New Mexico (1988 – 1990)
• Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Auckland (1986 – 1987)
• Associate Professor, Eotvos University (1984 – 1996)
• Research Fellow, Szeged University (1982 – 1984)

Courses Taught

• MATH 122: Calculus for Business Administration and Social Sciences
• MATH 141: Calculus I
• MATH 142: Calculus II
• MATH 174: Discrete Mathematics for Computer Science
• MATH 241: Vector Calculus
• MATH 242: Elementary Differential Equations
• MATH 374: Discrete Structures
• MATH 550: Vector Analysis
• MATH 570: Discrete Optimization
• MATH 574: Discrete Mathematics I
• MATH 774: Discrete Mathematics I
• MATH 775: Discrete Mathematics II
• MATH 778B: Selected Topics in Discrete Mathematics: the Linear Algebra Method in Combinatorics

Selected Publications

• E. Czabarka, L. A. Szekely, S. Wagner, A tanglegram Kuratowski theorem, J. Graph Theory 90(2)(2019), 111-122.
• John Asplund, Gregory Clark, Garner Cochran, Eva Czabarka, Arran Hamm, Gwen Spencer, Laszlo Szekely, Libby Taylor, Zhiyu Wang, Using block designs in crossing number bounds, J. Combin. Designs 27(2019)(10), 586-597.
• P. L. Erdos, M. A. Steel, L. A. Szekely, and T. J. Warnow, A few logs suffice to build (almost) all trees I-II Random Structures and Algorithms 14(1999)(2), 153-184, and Theor. Comp. Sci. 221(1-2)(1999), 77-118.
• L. A. Szekely, Crossing numbers and hard Erdos problems in discrete geometry, Combinatorics, Probability, and Computing 6(3)(1997), 353-358.
• F. Shahrokhi, O. Sykora, L. A. Szekely and I. Vrto, The crossing number of a graph on a compact 2-manifold, Adv. Math. 123(1996), 105-119