Acta Zoologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 62 (4), pp. 345–346, 2016

Greeting: László Papp, as an ordinary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences since 1998 and an outstanding taxonomist and ecologist of Diptera, a former Editor-in-Chief of the Acta Zoologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, celebrates his 70th birthday this year. The Editor is greatly honoured to introduce his life and his scientific achievements hereby.
László Papp was born in Aranyosgadány (a small village in the South of Hungary), on the 3rd of October 1946. He graduated as a biologist in 1970 at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Since then he has had a long and still active scientific career spanning over almost five decades. His professional career started at the Hungarian Natural History Museum in the year of his graduation and he was performing scientific work there until 2010, most of the time as a curator of the Diptera collection. In the meantime he spent a year in a provincial elementary school in order to acquire the methodology of teaching. Thereafter he was a professor of zoology of the Department of Parasitology and Zoology, University of Veterinary Medicine for three and a half years. Later, at the museum again, he established the Animal Ecology Research Group hosted by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Hungarian Natural History Museum in 1996, and he chaired this group until 2010. Besides the work in the museum, he gave lectures at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, as well as at the Debrecen and Szeged Universities in the respective cities.
He was active in the scientific public life as well. As one of the founders of the Hungarian Ecological Society, member and executive officer of several organizations including the Hungarian Entomological Society, the Hungarian Biological Society, the Hungarian Society of Parasitologists, the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature and the Royal Entomological Society, he organized and supervised a number of national and international conferences and congresses, and took part in the work of numerous committees at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Moreover, he is a member of the editorial boards of journals such as Bolletino della Societá Entomologica Italiana and editor-in-chief of our journal between 1992 and 1996, and a member of our advisory board now.
During his third year of biological studies at Eötvös Loránd University, his professor, the outstanding ecologist János Balogh called his attention to the importance of flies in decomposition/recuperation processes. After field sampling the identification of the collected Diptera specimens was in the focus of his work. Since then, the research interest of László Papp aimed first of all at taxonomy and morphology of Diptera, but he achieved excellent results among others in the field of faunistics (fauna of the Hungarian national parks), the ecology of rare species, species of veterinary importance, participation of flies in production biology processes and abundance structure of fly communities, respectively. His research and scientific activity has resulted in the publication of over 400 scientific books and papers, with almost 3000 independent citations of these works. He published several important issues in the series of Fauna Hungariae, one of the most important sources for those researchers who need fly identification. There is no doubt that two series of books belong to his most important results. He edited with Árpád Soós the Catalogue of Palaearctic Diptera 1–13. and with Béla Darvas the Contributions to a Manual of Palaearctic Diptera I–IV.
His widely appreciated scientific and organizational activity has won him many awards and honours. They include the Ipolyi Arnold Award, and Széchenyi Award as well as the For Hungarian Ecology award.
It is the Editor’s pleasure to wish László Papp cordially all the best with many productive and joyful years to come. A special pleasure is wishing him: ad multos annos.

Author: Gábor Bakonyi, Editor-in-Chief

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