In 1962 Takács published his Introduction to the Theory of Queues, a masterpiece and, at the same time, one of the most widely cited monographs in queueing. His other masterpiece, On Fluctuations of Sums of Random Variables, published in 1978 is less popular, but it undoubtedly deserves more attention. Due to his phenomenal diversity, Takács left traces in many areas of mathematics and probability, such as: queueing theory, combinatorial analysis, point processes, random walks, branching processes, Markov processes, semi-Markov processes, probability on groups, signal processes, statistics, fluctuation theory, sojourn time problems in stochastic processes, ballot theorems, and random graphs. In spite
of his numerous commitments, Takács is still amazingly productive. In 1993 he was elected a Foreign Member of the highly renowned Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and recently he was awarded the prestigious John von Neumann Theory Prize by the Operations Research Society of America and The Institute of Management Sciences. Currently, he is a professor emeritus at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.