The Rényi prize was founded in 1972 honouring the Institute's founder and first director, Alfréd Rényi. At the beginning it was a yearly award, after 2005 it has be awarded in every odd year.
The decision regarding the award is made by the Scientific Council of the Institute, composed by the members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
The prize is aimed to acknowledge outstanding results of the Institute's researchers in the last 5 years.
In this centennial year the Council decided to hand out two awards.
The first Rényi prize in 2021 has been awarded to Márton Elekes.
For his outstanding reserach achievments, with a special emphasis on results and papers concerning Haar null sets.
A shared Rényi Prize has been awarded to Dániel Gerbner and Balázs Patkós.
Dániel Gerbner and Balázs Patkós published an important book entitled "Extremal Finite Set Theory". This branch of combinatorics - initiated by Paul Erdős - was dominated by colleagues of our Institute. The authors themselves initiated and developed new directions in this subject.