László Kalmár

László Kalmár (27 March 1905, in Edde – 2 August 1976, in Mátraháza) was a Hungarian mathematician and Professor at the University of Szeged.

The appointment of Haar and Riesz turned Szeged into a major research center for mathematics.

He also founded Szeged's Cybernetic Laboratory and the Research Group for Mathematical Logic and Automata Theory.

In mathematical logic, Kalmár proved that certain classes of formulas of the first-order predicate calculus were decidable.

Kalmar defined what are known as elementary functions, number-theoretic functions (i.e. those based on the natural numbers) built up from the notions of composition and variables, the constants 0 and 1, repeated addition + of the constants, proper subtraction ∸, bounded summation and bounded product (Kleene 1952:526).

Elimination of the bounded product from this list yields the subelementary or lower elementary functions.