Lajos Jánossy

Lajos Jánossy was a Hungarian physicist, astrophysicist and mathematician, born on 2 March 1912 and died on 2 March 1978, and a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His research ranged over astrophysics, nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, mathematical physics, statistics, electrodynamics and optics. Raised in Vienna and Berlin, he worked in Werner Kolhörster's laboratory, then in Britain on cosmic radiation with P. M. S. Blackett at Birkbeck College and at Manchester, and from 1947 at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, where he completed his 1948 monograph on cosmic rays. Returning to Budapest in 1950, he managed the cosmic radiation department of the Central Research Institute for Physics, which he directed from 1956 to 1970, and founded the nuclear physics department at Eötvös Loránd University. The joint probability densities he introduced for random point processes are called Jánossy densities, and he carried out a well-known low-intensity photon interference experiment.