✍ Scribed by A. Böttcher; F. Gesztesy; R. Mennicken
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Erhard Schmidt passed away on 6 December 1959, at the age of 83. He was an exceptional person and an outstanding mathematician whose contributions to mathematics are still vividly alive nowadays and have irremovable entered the mathematics around all of us for now more than a century. We are in particular greatly indebted to him for founding the journal Mathematische Nachrichten in 1948. We therefore decided to dedicate a memorial issue of the Mathematische Nachrichten to Erhard Schmidt, 50 years after his death.
We invited several colleagues to contribute a paper to the memorial issue and were overwhelmed by the favorable response we received. Originally, we intended to release the issue in 2009, but due to the huge number of articles that arrived and the numerous promises to prepare a contribution within a short time, we soon realized that one issue would not be enough to accommodate all contributions. Moreover, we also subjected all submissions to the usual refereeing procedure of the Mathematische Nachrichten, and although all referees showed kind understanding to our request to write the report within six weeks or so, it had certainly been too much of a hurry to provide the Publishing House with the material by mid 2009.
It will finally turn out to be the first two or three issues of the Mathematische Nachrichten in 2010 which will be composed of papers dedicated to the memory of Erhard Schmidt on the occasion of his 50 th obit. We thank all authors for sending us so many excellent papers, we gratefully appreciate the invaluable work done by all the referees, and we are greatly indebted to WILEY-VCH Verlag Gmbh & Co. KGaA, Weinheim, for the warm reception of our idea and the permanent indulgence. Our special thanks go to Albrecht Pietsch for contributing a wonderful article about the life and work of Erhard Schmidt.
In 1951, on a ceremony on the occasion of Erhard Schmidt's 75 th birthday, he was handed over a volume of the Mathematische Nachrichten that was published in honor of him. Erhard Schmidt expressed his sincere gratitude to the authors of this volume and added "Sehr viele Autoren sind mir in unauslöschlicher Erinnerung. Ich kann an Hand ihrer Namen mein Leben wiederholen, und es kommt mir so vor, als ob jeder, der hier als Autor mitgewirkt hat, mir einen Teil seines Geistes, ein Stück von seinem Wesen geschenkt hat, das immer lebendig bleiben, immer zu mir reden wird, wenn mich verlangt".
(Many of the authors are inextinguishable in my memory. By their names, I can repeat my life, and it appears to me as if each of them has granted me a part of his spirit, a piece of his mind, which will be alive forever and will speak to me whenever I am anxious to listen.)
We all have met the name of Erhard Schmidt at several stages of our mathematical education and thus bear some of his ideas in ourselves. In this sense, his spirit and mind are alive in the present generations of mathematicians.
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