Horvath received his doctorate in 1947 from the
University of Budapest as a student of
Lipót Fejér and
Frigyes Riesz. Four other talented mathematicians also graduated in the class of 1947:
János Aczél,
Ákos Császár,
László Fuchs and
István Gál. Together with Horvath, they were referred to as the Big Five. In 1957 Horvath finally went to the United States, where he taught at the
University of Maryland until 1994 and was then awarded the title of Professor Emeritus. It was Schwartz, who recommended him to write elementary textbook on distribution theory.
MathSciNet called his book
Topological Vector Spaces and Distributions (1966), "The most readable introduction to the theory of vector spaces available in English and possibly any other language." In 2006, Horvath edited and wrote one of the chapters (
Holomorphic Functions) for
A Panorama of Hungarian Mathematics in the Twentieth Century. In 1997, he received an honorary doctorate of the Universidad de los Andes. And in 1998, he became a member of the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in 2001 he was elected to the
Colombian Academy of Sciences. ==Works==