Miklós Ajtai received his Ph.D. from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1975. His advisor was András Hajnal. He worked in the following areas: axiomatic set theory (independence proofs), lattice theory (posets with meet and join), combinatorics, the theory of random graphs, complexity theory, sorting networks, the theory of lattices (n-dimensional grids) and their applications to complexity theory and cryptography. He is a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and was an invited speaker at ICM in 1998. He received the Knuth prize in 2003, and the IBM Corporate Award in 2000.