G . Polya , 1887 - 1985

Jakab was a lawyer in the Budapest office of the Assicurazioni Generali of Trieste, a large international insurance firm. Before joining the company he had had a private law practice. His real interests, however, lay in economics and statistics and he continued to study these on the side, in the hope of obtaining an academic position in economics, so that he could devote full time to research. To help in obtaining such a position, in 1882 he changed the family name from Pollak to the rustic Hungarian Polya (pronounced po'yaw, or, more commonly in English, pol'yaw). While earning a living in the law, he wrote a number of books and pamphlets, and he learned languages as well, including enough English to translate Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations into Hungarian, a translation used as a text in Hungarian schools for decades. Shortly before his untimely death from a heart attack, he succeeded in becoming Privatdozent at the University of Budapest. Polya's mother came from a family claiming residence in Buda since the 16th century. The family included several professional people; one, a professor of botany, was a contemporary of Polya's mother. George was 10 when his father died and left his wife, George, and four other children, two boys and two girls. Another girl had died in infancy. Polya's older brother by 11 years, Eugene (Jeno), studied medicine and became a famous surgeon and professor of surgery at the University. He was eminent in his field, having developed a technique of stomach surgery that bears his name, but he loved mathematics and regretted having chosen medicine over mathematics as a career. After their father's death in 1897, the two sisters, Ilona and Flora, had to go to work for the insurance firm in order to help support the family. Much later, the younger brother, Laszlo, was killed in the First World War. A few of the descendants of these have gone on to study mathematics seriously. Polya's mother urged him to take up his father's profession so he tried studying law at the University of Budapest, where he enrolled in 1905, but he found it boring, so he continued in the subject for only one semester. From law he moved to languages and literature for two years and passed an examination for a teacher's certificate that allowed him to teach Latin and Hungarian in the lower grades of the gymnasium, a …