hundreds of people, including many mathematicians, gathered at Kerepesi Cemetery in Budapest to pay their last respects to Paul Erdo s. If there was one theme suggested by the farewell orations, it was that the world of mathematics had lost a legend, one of its great representatives. On October 21, 1996, in accordance with his last wishes, Paul Erdo s' ashes were buried in his parents' grave at the Jewish cemetery on Kozma street in Budapest.
Paul Erdo s was one of this century's greatest and most prolific mathematicians. He is said to have written about 1500 papers, with almost 500 co-authors. He made fundamental contributions in numerous areas of mathematics.
There is a Hungarian saying to the effect that one can forget everything but one's first love. When considering Erdo s and his mathematics, we cannot speak of first love,'' but of first loves,'' and approximation theory was among them. Paul Erdo s wrote more than 100 papers that are connected, in one way or another, with the approximation of functions. In these two short reviews, we try to present some of Paul's fundamental contributions to approximation theory.