Mathwar/Personlist/Szegoe Gabor
Gabor Szegoe
(* January 20th 1895in Kunhegyes, † August 7th 1985 in Palo Alto)
Hungarian mathematician
Life
Gábor Szegö was born in Kunhegyes, a small town in Hungary about 120 km southeast of Budapest. His undergraduate studies were undertaken in Budapest.
After attending university in Budapest, Szegö went to Berlin where he studied under, among others, Frobenius, Schwarz, Knopp and Schottky, and Göttingen where he studied with Hilbert, Edmund Landau and Haar. He returned to Hungary where he worked under Féjer and Kurschak. He acted as a coach to the young von Neumann.
He enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian cavalry in the First World War and spent some time in the Air force where he met von Mises.
In 1921 he moved to Berlin where he became a friend of Schur and worked with von Mises and Schmidt.
In 1926 he moved to Königsberg to succeed Knopp as professor. He stayed there until 1934 when the pressure on him as a Jew forced him to move to the USA where he found a post at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. In 1938 he moved to Stanford where he remained for the rest of his working life.
Szegö's most important work was in the area of extremal problems and Toeplitz matrices. This work led him to introduce the notion of the Szegö reproducing kernel. From these beginnings he moved to prove a number of limit theorems, now known as the Szegö limit theorem, the strong Szegö limit theorem and Szegö's orthogonal polynomials and on the unit circle.