โ Scribed by Doron.S Lubinsky
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
I first met Oved Shisha in 1982, at the Technion in Haifa, Israel, where he was spending a sabbatical year and I had a postdoctoral fellowship. Shisha was teaching a graduate course in approximation theory, and this was exceptionally lucky for me: my Ph.D. was on Pade approximation, and the narrow focus of my studies meant that I had graduated without knowing about Jackson's theorem. Shisha's courses were taught in the afternoons in his office in the prefabricated huts close to the Technion's Churchill building. The students would read sections of the textbooks of Cheney and Lorentz and then discuss them in class. Oved's taste for simplicity in mathematics frequently emerged in these discussions.
Sometimes the four or five participants would first have tea from the small urn down the passage and Oved would sympathetically listen to their hopes and aspirations and also to their personal problems. Since I had more free time than the graduate students, I was able to talk to him at greater length, and absorbed some of what he thought important in approximation theory, in current ideas and active areas of research. Our discussions led to one joint paper, on best rational approximation on the whole plane, partially a mixture of my interest in rational approximation and his interest in the existence and uniqueness theory of best approximation [83] (see ``Publications of Oved Shisha,'' which follows).
From time to time Oved would become extremely busy with the latest issue of the Journal of Approximation Theory. He would spend hours in his office poring over galley proofs, checking language, style, and mathematical detail. After a marathon two-or three-day effort, he would emerge with a large sack of manuscripts over his shoulder and relieve himself of the burden until the next issue. The Journal was a very large part of his life, and he recalled on more than one occasion his joy in founding and successfully running it. He would also happily recall his days at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, where he could arrange conferences on inequalities and invite many visitors, while enjoying generous support for research, and where the idea for the Journal apparently began.
Paul Erdo s paid one of his frequent visits to the Technion in 1983, and Oved introduced me to him. The visit coincided with Paul's 70th birthday, and he gave one of his famous problem talks. Oved, Paul, Allan Pinkus, and the complex function theorist J. Milne Anderson began a paper on moment problems during this visit [93]. I carried Paul Erdo s' suits to the local dry cleaner, and as a reward he gave me some of the best advice of
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