Georg(e) Pólya, born in Budapest, December 13, 1887. Georg(e) Pólya initially studied law, then languages and literature in Budapest. He came to mathematics in order to understand philosophy, but the subject of his doctorate in 1912 was in probability theory and he promptly abandoned philosophy. After a year in Göttingen and a short stay in Paris, he received an appointment at the ETH in Zürich. His research was multi-faceted, ranging from series, probability, number theory and combinatorics to astronomy and voting systems. Some of his deepest work was on entire functions. He also worked in conformal mappings, potential theory, boundary value problems, and isoperimetric problems in mathematical physics, as well as heuristics late in his career. When Pólya left Europe in 1940, he first went to Brown University, then two years later to Stanford, where he remained until his death on September 7, 1985.
