A tribute to Dick Askey

Richard A. (Dick) Askey1 was born June 4, 1933 in St. Louis, Missouri. He received his PhD at Princeton University in 1961 under the direction of Salomon Bochner. After instructorships at Washington University and the University of Chicago he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1963, where he became full professor in 1968. Since 2003 he is Professor Emeritus at that same institution. Dick received many awards and distinctions during the course of his mathematical career. He was elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993 and of the National Academy of Sciences in 1999. Furthermore, he is a Honorary Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of SIAM and of the American Mathematical Society. In 1983 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Warszawa. In 2012 he received an honorary doctorate from SASTRA University in Kumbakonam, India. Dick Askey’s research interests are Special Functions and Orthogonal Polynomials, and more generally Classical Analysis. His works often touch upon aspects of approximation theory, harmonic analysis, number theory, combinatorics and probability theory. He published2 140 research articles in journals, conference proceedings and edited books. His most frequent coauthors are George Gasper, Mourad Ismail and Stephen Wainger. Dick’s research publications include two AMS Memoirs: one written with Mourad Ismail in 1984 [7], and one with James Wilson in 1985 [8] on the Askey-Wilson polynomials, probably his most influential publication. This memoir also gave for the first time the directed graph of hypergeometric orthogonal polynomials which became universally known as the Askey scheme (MSC code 33C45). An inequality in his 1976 paper in Amer. J. Math. coauthored with George Gasper [6] was decisive for Louis de Branges [13] to settle the Bieberbach conjecture (1985). ∗KdV Insitute, University of Amsterdam, P.O. Box 94248, 1090 GE Amsterdam, Netherlands; [email protected] †Department of Mathematics, KU Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200 B, B-3001, Heverlee, Belgium; [email protected] ‡School of Mathematics and Physics, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia; [email protected] Biographical data from [11], [12] Bibliographical data at [11], [12], [10]