George Pólya

George Polya was a Hungarian-American mathematician, born on 13 December 1887 and died on 7 September 1985. He was a professor of mathematics from 1914 to 1940 at ETH Zurich and from 1940 to 1953 at Stanford University. He made fundamental contributions to combinatorics, number theory, complex analysis, numerical analysis and probability theory, and is also noted for his work in heuristics and mathematics education. He has been described as one of the Martians, an informal category of Hungarian-American scientists that also included one of his most famous students, John von Neumann.