HANS SCHNEIDER, born in 1927 in Vienna, Austria, left that country
rather precipitously to take up the life of a Scottish schoolboy
in 1939. In due course, he entered Edinburgh University, obtaining
an M.A. (1948) and a Ph.D. (1952) with a thesis on nonnegative
matrices under that genius, A. C. Aitken. This led to a lifelong
addiction to linear algebra. After seven years at Queen^Ás
University, Belfast, he migrated to the University of Wisconsin,
and now boasts of being J. J. Sylvester Professor Emeritus. He has
published about 140 research papers, joint with about half that
many coauthors, and has produced three physical children (joint
with his wife Miriam) and seventeen mathematical children, of all
of whom he is proud. He was the first president of the
International Linear Algebra Society, and his stint as
editor-in-chief of Linear Algebra and its Applications is as yet
unfinished after thirty-two years. He likes to walk barefoot on
Lanikai beach in the light of the full moon and wishes it would
happen more often. Department of Mathematics, University of
Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, USA. hans@math.wisc.edu