Bela Fejer Obituary -

More than 30 Ph.D. students completed their dissertations under his supervision. His final student, Dr. Mate Horvath, defended in June 2024. Bela attended via video call from his hospital bed. After the defense, he simply typed in the chat: “Not bad, kid. Now go fix something.” Beyond the Szegő Prize, Bela Fejer was a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2015), a recipient of the Humboldt Research Award (2011), and an elected member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2019). He served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Approximation Theory and the Acta Mathematica Hungarica .

Bela Fejer, 1955–2024. Rest in the space of square-integrable peace. For the full academic citation of Bela Fejer’s life and works, a peer-reviewed obituary will appear in the February 2025 issue of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. The family requests that any private condolences be sent via the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics in Budapest. bela fejer obituary

But to reduce Bela Fejer to dates and survivors would be to miss the point entirely. To his students, he was “The Equalizer.” To his peers, he was the man who solved the Fejer Conundrum —a problem his own grandfather, the legendary Lipót Fejér, had posed in 1918 and left unsolved for nearly a century. Born in Budapest in 1955, Bela Fejer grew up under the long shadow of his grandfather, Lipót Fejér—one of the founding fathers of modern harmonic analysis. For any young mathematician, such a lineage is both a blessing and a curse. In his early twenties, Bela struggled to emerge from the academic orbit of his forebear. He often joked, “At family dinners, they didn’t ask if I liked math. They asked if I had found a new proof for Fejér’s theorem yet. I was ten.” More than 30 Ph