Klaus Schmidt

Klaus Schmidt has been the Head of the Schrodinger Institute, Vienna. Schmidt was a student of Parthasarathy when I needed a lecturer to fill a joint appointment as a numerical analyst and statistician at Bedford College (London). Schmidt had worked on infinite-divisibility of group characters, so I was very sympathetic, and he was appointed (though he was neither a numerical person nor a statistician). He was in a joint position at the Institute for Numerical Analysis, a University Institute created to strengthen this unpopular subject. When the Institute was abolished, he became a full member of staff, but was soon stolen by Warwick University, where his deep work on the cocyles in ergodic theory quickly led to promotion.