My father was very successful in his profession. However, in 1906, he refused to participate in the suppression of a strike on his railway near St Petersburg. Since then, he was not permitted to work on railways owned by the state. This forced him to move to the Caucasus, where most railways belonged to private companies. In 1913-1918 we lived in Armavir [near the Black Sea] in North Caucasus. This middle-sized town changed hands (from White to Red and back) three times during the civil war that followed the revolution. Later, in 1919-1922, we lived on a farm near Sochi, until the times became more stable. Next we moved to Tbilissi, the capital of Georgia.

In 1937, my father was arrested in Tbilissi and sentenced to eight years based on an obviously false accusation. He died in a concentration camp the next year. This had a profound influence on me. Although I had prepared some 50% of my projected textbook, and although Fichtenholz had arranged for me a tuition-free year at the University, I could not complete it, and until 1942 worked on mathematics only moderately.

Soon there remained only a narrow corridor connecting Leningrad to Lake Ladoga, the eastern shore of the lake remaining in Soviet hands. The war was to bring the population of Leningrad horrible sufferings. During the severe winter of 1941-42, there was artillery fire into the city, but no air raids. For private use, there was no electric power, no water (the water piping was frozen), no public transportation. By some reports, one million people died of starvation. Since November, I belonged to the paramilitary group for the air defence of Leningrad. Almost all my friends were either evacuated to the East or drafted into the army. After several attempts to be evacuated with my wife Tanny, some of them illegal, we succeeded in joining a group of faculty and students of the Herzen Pedagogical Institute. At the beginning of April 1942 we crossed the still frozen Lake Ladoga in trucks and joined a train. After a month's journey we arrived at the Kislovodsk spa in the Northern Caucasus.

... the French authorities classified me as an undesirable foreigner, ... and the university was not allowed to offer me a fellowship. In Spring, 1946, leaving my family in Tübingen, I went to the American zone of occupation. In Heidelberg, an American officer supervising the refugees gave me an identification document stating that I was stateless. I lived with this document until my USA naturalisation 13 years later. Because of the habilitation at Tübingen, I could teach as a docent, for three semesters at the University of Frankfurt. I often travelled to Tübingen, and in 1948 was appointed an 'Honorarprofessor' [Docent with a permanent salary] there.

.. we lived uncomfortably and in poor conditions, with food scarcity. But mathematically it was a happy time for me. In Tübingen, during the war, I repeated my lectures on Banach space theory for the faculty (Professors Knopp, Hellmuth Kneser, Kamke, Müller) and some students with great success. I wrote some 20 papers: joint papers with Kamke and Knopp, papers related to differential equations, papers on summability, on Fourier series, and papers where rearrangements play a role.

The author ... is a well-known expert in this field, and his careful up-to-date and easily readable account of problems and progress, the first in book form, should be welcome to a large class of advanced students of mathematical analysis.

Those of us who were at the University of Toronto in 1949 remember the perfection of his lectures, both graduate and undergraduate. They were delivered with a command of English which made it difficult to believe he had not had much previous experience lecturing in this language. The organization of the material was very good and the content presented a titillating mixture of well-known theorems and personal research. Sometimes the material would be so new that it could not be found elsewhere.

As a supervisor of graduate work he displayed an unending zeal and interest in his students' work. At one time, I remember, there were five of us coming to him separately each week for an hour. We were always greeted with a smile and treated to an intelligent and pertinent discussion of our work. When we bogged down, he took a hand himself; when we succeeded, he praised us. He has always given of his knowledge freely and been very stimulating to students, even those in lines different from his own.

This book is strongly recommended for every college library because of the first eight chapters. Here the author goes out of his way to keep the discussion elementary (not easy!). Chapters nine, ten, and eleven concern entropy and Kolmogorov's solution of Hilbert's thirteenth problem. Fascinating, but highly special, and not self-contained for non-specialists ... The book abounds with amusing and interesting insights. There are problems and notes which extend the results in the text and give their history. A special feature is the coverage of the Russian literature of this field.

The author's stated aim in writing this book was to provide an accessible but reasonably complete treatment of several topics in Approximation Theory. The book is aimed at the graduate or advanced undergraduate level, and includes a considerable number of problems (some of which are rather more challenging than others). As everyone familiar with the book knows, the author has been very successful at meeting his goals, and the book is indeed a very readable introduction to the subject and makes an excellent textbook.

This is a first-rate and very up-to-date monograph on approximation theory. The authors are top researchers in the field who had good taste and judgement in collecting the most important results of the constructive aspects of the theory. ... This monograph may well be the best book available on the subject, so it can be recommended to graduate students, mathematicians, physicists and engineers who have an interest in constructive approximation. The authors not only collect the most important results on the subject, but in many instances they also provide new proofs as well. The organization and presentation are extremely clear, and the book is suitable for graduate and even higher level undergraduate courses.

After the trigonometric integrals, Bernstein polynomials are the most important and interesting concrete operators on a space of continuous functions. Since the appearance of the first edition of this book, the interest in this subject has continued.

So many outside interests attract him personally that we can only indicate them - travel, mountains, fine books, photography, languages and not least of all, chess. I suspect that conversation could be, too, one of his main interests.

George's last years were spent in Chico, California, where his wife Tanny died at the age of 91. At the time of his death, George was survived by all of his children [Rudolph, Mary, Irene, Olga, and Katherine], eight grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

He served for many years on the Editorial Board of [the Journal of Approximation Theory] and served the wider mathematical community through his rich and deep contributions to approximation theory. He was one of the founders of the contemporary theory of approximation. His books have been profoundly influential ...