István Győrffy

* Hidasnémeti, December 19, 1880 – † Székesfehérvár, April 16, 1959 / botanist, university professor, corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1940) ; ; He completed his university studies in Cluj-Napoca. He was also a teaching assistant for a few years. It was then that he met his future wife, Irma Julianna Greisiger, with whom he lived for a while in Szepesbéla with his father-in-law, when they taught at the Levoca gymnasium between 1909 and 1913. (Before that, they worked at the Makó gymnasium.) Győrffy returned to Cluj-Napoca in 1913, where he was a private tutor and then a regular professor at the university. After World War I, the University of Cluj-Napoca moved first to Budapest and then to Szeged, and here István Győrffy founded the new botany department and created the university's botanical garden. During his years in Szeged, he was twice elected dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, and then in 1929–1930 he was also rector. Between 1940–1944 he was again a professor at the University of Cluj-Napoca. In 1940 he was elected a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, but in 1949 he was stripped of his membership, which was only restored in 1989. In 1944–1945 he was a scientific associate at the Salzburg Museum. In 1945 he returned to Hungary and lived as a pensioner in the Mátra region, in Gyula, and finally in Csákvár. His main field of research was bryology. ; He dealt with the ecology, flora, and developmental disorders of mosses. He and his wife regularly examined the flora of the High Tatras for more than 30 years, but he also occasionally reported on ornithological observations (Lucés's fir-seed-eating birds. Aquila, 1910, The golden eagle in the Carpathians and the Mátra. Aquila, 1947). During his professorships in Szeged and Cluj-Napoca, summer holidays were usually spent in Szepesbéla and Levoca. Between 1915–1919, he was the editor of the Botanical Museum Bulletins published in Cluj-Napoca, and between 1924–1944, Folia cryptogamica published in Szeged. He discovered many new species and genera, and several species were named after him. He also published an article on Hungarian plant names and folk plant names. His son, Barna Győrffy, was a plant geneticist and biochemist. ; ; His main works: ; Bryological data for the flora of the High Tatras (a series of articles published in the Hungarian Botanical Journals), 1905–1925, ; The flora of liverworts and leaf mosses around Bratislava (Works of the General Assembly of Hungarian Doctors and Naturalists), 1907, ; The flora of Transcarpathia and its practical use and unresolved questions, 1942, ; The flowerless plants of Transylvania in the light of future research. (Transylvanian scientific papers. 152., Cluj-Napoca), 1943.