Tibor Szalai

* Bratislava, November 13, 1900 – † Budapest, September 29, 1980 / geologist, paleontologist ; ; His original name was Szládek. He completed his secondary education at the Pécs State High School. From 1919 he studied geology at the Budapest University of Science and Technology, where he obtained a doctoral degree in 1924. His first job was at the Mineral and Fossil Department of the Hungarian National Museum, and then in 1939 he moved to the Geological Institute. Based on his work on earth structure, the University of Debrecen qualified him as a private teacher (1938). During his years as a scholarship holder at the Collegium Hungaricum in Vienna (1928–1931), he attended lectures by O. Abel and L. Kober. Chief geologist (1944), deputy director (1945), acting director (1946-1950) at the Geological Institute. During the war, he did great service by saving the books of the Geological Institute. From 1950, he was the chief geologist of the Dorog Coal Mining Trust, then of the Tokod Deep Drilling Company (1954). From 1956 until his retirement in 1964, he was a geological consultant at the Hungarian State Eötvös Loránd Geophysical Institute. He dealt with paleontology, hydrogeology and tectonics. He studied in detail the geological structure and structure of the Eastern Alps and the Carpathians, the origin of the temperature of thermal waters, and the relationship between inorganic and organic life in general. He published more than a hundred papers on various fields of the earth sciences. He did a lot for the establishment of the General Geological Department of the Hungarian Geological Society (1969), of which he was the president and editor of its publication. ; ; His main works: ; Der Einfluss der Gebirgsbildung auf die Evolution des Lebens, 1936, ; Az közökeleti Kárpátok geologijaja, 1947, ; Bitumen occurrences in the Szentendre-Visegrád mountains. ; Az eocene söltutság, 1959, ; Aufbau und Tektonik des Ostalpin- und Karpaten Blockes, 1966.