I knew K. O. Friedrichs only during the last dozen years of his life when, for a long period, we worked very closely on a book about Richard Courant. Since his life and Courant 's were intimately connected, he told me a great deal about himself in the course of telling me about Courant. I have drawn also on the recollections of his family and a few colleagues---especially Hans Lewy---and on the account of his scientific work which he himself wrote for McGraw-Hill's Modern Scientists and Engineers. Friedrichs was born on September 28, 1901, in Kiel, a Baltic port and the capital of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein. He was christened Kurt Otto, but in later years he objected to the sharp, abrupt sound of "Kurt," which he felt didn't suit him, and preferred to be called "Frieder." He was the second of three children. (An older sister became a teacher of English and a brother, a dist inguished English translator and interpreter.) The mother, Elisabeth Entel Friedrichs, was from Silesia. She was an exceptionally lovely woman whom the boy Friedrichs adored and for whom he was to name his only daughter. The father, Karl Friedrichs, was a lawyer and legal writer, an expert on laws affecting the Civil Service. He could be maddeningly fussy in small matters---"quite impossible"--but superb and very wise in the big things, so Friedrichs described him. It was a description which his own sons would later feel could be even more appropriately applied to him. The Friedrichs family had long been established and politically active in Hols te inthe great-grandfather having fought for its independence from Denmark-but the family left Kiel shortly after Friedrichs's birth and by the time he was ready for school had settled in Dfisseldorf. There the elder Friedrichs became acquainted with another lawyer, the brother of the mathematician Felix Klein, the powerful director of mathematics at the universi ty in G6t t ingen--commonly known, even beyond the borders of Germany, as "the mecca of mathematics." Throughout his youth, Friedrichs was plagued by asthma and rarely able to participate in the activities of the other young people. He remembered himself as very timid; however, after he had made his Abitur at the Realgymnasium in Dfisseldorf, he moved--fol lowing the custom of the day-f rom university to university: to Greifswald for a term, to Freiburg for a year, and to the Austrian university of Graz for a term. "Then I said to myself, "Now I must go to the mecca of mathematics!' " In the fall of 1922 he arrived in G6ttingen with a letter of introduction from Felix Klein's lawyer brother.