Career
His contributions to combinatorics include the partial colouring lemma and the Beck–Fiala theorem in discrepancy theory, the algorithmic version of the Lovász local lemma, the two extremes theorem in combinatorial geometry and the second moment method in the theory of positional games, among others Jiří Matoušek and Joel Spencer later succeeded in getting rid of this factor, showing that the bound was really sharp. Beck gave an invited talk at the 1986 International Congress of Mathematicians.
