Henry Pollak Interview

Henry O. Pollak, born in Vienna, Austria on December 13, 1927, came to the United States as a child, having left Europe with his family to escape Naziism. He was for many years a mathematician on the staff of the Bell Telephone Laboratories. The interview begins with Pollak's educational experiences, both in Europe and America, including his undergraduate years at Yale (where one of his mathematics professors was Edward Begle), and his mathematics Ph.D. at Harvard under Lars Ahlfors. The remainder of the interview covers Pollak's views on mathematics education, with particular attention to his participation in Begle's School Mathematics Study Group in the late 1950s and 1960s.