Szilvia Pápai built her career path
Hungarian economics student studied our academic ways to further her own studies
Szilvia Pápai develops mathematical models on the stability of coalition formation, yet she readily admits that her path from Hungary to Concordia was entirely random.
Pápai joined Concordia’s Economics Department in August as a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair.
She graduated from Hungary’s University of Economics. Students who wished to pursue a career in research after their BA determined their own committee members and course of study. “Every step took months,” Pápai recalled.
Researchers were affiliated either with a university or a research institute. Pápai found herself in the latter.
“Researchers who weren’t ‘reliable Communists’ would be sent to institutes where they could not contaminate other students,” she said. As a result, these researchers working outside the university could pursue their interests independent of party priorities.
Through an international student internship program, Pápai went to Guelph, Ont., where her English was put to the test.
“I’d learned grammar rules and some vocabulary, but nobody believed that any one of us would ever use the language. I’d never even heard a native speaker,” Pápai said.
As her communication skills improved, she learned about life in the West, including the existence of graduate programs. After her internship, she set about applying to American universities. “It was pretty random. This was pre-Internet, so I had no way to determine which schools were good.”
Montreal is becoming a centre for game theory
On top of that, university students in Hungary at that time managed their own booklet of grades, and translating this into an acceptable transcript became a complicated cultural exchange exercise.
Even getting letters of recommendation was difficult, because “professors believed that subjectively promoting an individual student was dishonest.”
She applied to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) simply because it did not require an admission fee. Wiring the money from Hungary doubled the application costs of most universities.
Caltech proved to be the ideal environment for her to learn the mathematical theories she came to love. She began to apply her newly acquired game theoretical tools to the analysis of the allocation of goods among individuals.
Pápai’s work is entirely theoretical: she develops game theoretical models which may later lead to applications. In her early work she developed a new method for the allocation of indivisible goods that her supervisor used when, as division chair, he undertook to reassign offices to his faculty.
“I was never sure if he used my model to test it, or to shift the blame to me if people did not like their offices,” Pápai laughed.
After Caltech, Pápai taught in Istanbul, did postdoctoral work in Lisbon, and ended up at the University of Notre Dame before coming to Concordia.
Along the way, she began to use game theory and social choice theory to explore the conditions under which stable coalitions can form.
In addition to Pápai, Concordia professors Effrosyni Diamantoudi, Dipjyoti Majum-dar and Ming Li are also active researchers in game theory. Pápai said that part of the attraction of Montreal is that it has become a centre for game theory and social choice theory.
A few years ago, a dozen such experts in a single room outside of an international conference would have been remarkable. Now, there are that many currently working at universities here in a single city.
It is another happy coincidence in Pápai’s career.