Alfréd Rényi

Rényi, a Hungarian Jewish mathematician who survived forced labor and hid under a false identity during the Holocaust, made deep contributions to probability theory and information theory. He generalized Shannon entropy into the family of 'Rényi entropies' now central to information theory, cryptography, and physics, and he did pioneering work on random graphs with Paul Erdős. He founded and led the Mathematical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences that now bears his name.