Gábor Szegő

Gábor Szegő was a Hungarian mathematician, born in Kunhegyes in 1895 and died in Palo Alto, California, in 1985. He grew up in a Jewish family, attended the Royal Hungarian Gymnasium in Szolnok, and in 1912 matriculated at the university in Budapest, where he won mathematics competitions in his first and second years. He studied in Berlin and Göttingen, served in the Austro-Hungarian forces in the First World War, and was awarded a doctorate by the University of Vienna in 1918 for work on Toeplitz determinants that grew out of a conjecture of George Pólya. With Pólya he wrote the Problem Book Aufgaben und Lehrsätze aus der Analysis, which became a classic. He became professor at Königsberg in 1926, left Germany under the Nazi regime for Washington University in St Louis in 1934, and in 1938 became head of mathematics at Stanford University. He worked mainly in function theory, classical orthogonal polynomials, isoperimetric inequalities and Toeplitz forms, and his most important work was on extremal problems and Toeplitz matrices, from which came the Szegő reproducing kernel and several limit theorems that carry his name. He wrote over 130 research articles and the monograph Orthogonal Polynomials.