A Conversation with Leopold Schmetterer

Abstract

Leopold Schmetterer was born on November 8, 1919, in Vienna. He received his doctorate in 1941 and his habilitation in 1949, both from the University of Vienna. Since 1948 he had a permanent lectureship for probability theory, since 1949 for statistics. In 1956 he became full professor at the university of Hamburg. In 1961 he returned to the University of Vienna as a professor of mathematics, since 1971 as a professor of mathematics and statistics. After having been elected an ordinary member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1971, he was elected Secretary General of this Academy in 1975, a position he held until 1983. In 1972 he received an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Clermont-Ferrand. Some further honors: 1961 Fellow of the IMS, 1967-1971 Vice president of the ISI, election into the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina and into the Berlin, Saxonian and Bavarian Academies of Sciences. He was visiting professor among others at the University of California at Berkeley, Catholic University in Washington, D.C., Bowling Green State University, Ohio, Technion, Haifa, and the University of Clermont-Ferrand. The following conversation took place in Freiburg at the beginning of