Gabor Szeg6": 1895-1985

The international mathematics community has recently celebrated the 100th anniversary of Gabor SzegS"s birth. 1 Gabor Szeg6 was 90 years old when he died. He was born in Kunhegyes on January 20,1895, and died in Palo Alto on August 7, 1985. His mother's and father's names were Hermina Neuman and Adolf Szeg6, respectively. His birth was formally recorded at the registry of the Karcag Rabbinical district on January 27, 1895. He came from a small town of approximately 9 thousand inhabitants in Hungary (approximately 150 km southeast of Budapest), and died in a town in northern California, U.S.A., with a population of approximately 55 thousand, near Stanford University and just miles away from Silicon Valley. So many things happened during the 90 years of his life that shaped the politics, history, economy, and technology of our times that one should not be surprised that the course of Szeg6's life did not follow the shortest geodesic curve between Kunhegyes and Palo Alto. I (R. A.) first met Szeg6 in the 1950s when he returned to St. Louis to visit old friends, and I was an instructor at Washington University. Earlier, when I was an undergraduate there, I had used a result found by Hsien Yu Hsu in his Ph.D. thesis at Washington University under Szeg6. This was in the first paper I wrote. While I was at the University of Chicago in the early 1960s, Szeg6 visited. I still remember seeing him at one end of the hall and a graduate student, Stephen V~gi, at the other end of the same hall. They walked toward each other and both started to speak in Hungarian. I am certain they had not met before, and I have always wondered how Szeg6 recognized another former Hungarian. In 1972, I spent a month in Budapest and Szeg6 was there. We talked most days, and although his health was poor and his memory was not as good as it had been a few years earlier, we had some very useful discussions. Three years earlier, also in Budapest, Szeg6