My father was born in the Aland Islands, which is a part of Finland but has a Swedish population and is completely Swedish-speaking. My ancestors came to Mariehamm in the Aland Islands from Bjorneborg, a smaller city on the mainland. I think that some of them were sea captains, with sailing ships that traded all over the world. My grandfather had a grocery store, and he must have done fairly well because he was able to send his children to school on the mainland. This was good since there were practically no schools on the Aland Islands. That's how my father was able to become first an engineer and then a professor of engineering at the Polytechnical Institute in Helsinki.

As a child I was fascinated by mathematics without understanding what it was about, but I was by no means a child prodigy. As a matter of fact I had no access to mathematical literature except in the highest grades. Having seen many prodigies spoilt by ambitious parents, I can only be thankful to my father for his restraint. The high school curriculum did not include any calculus, but I finally managed to learn some on my own, thanks to clandestine visits to my father's engineering library.

Why memorize the years associated with various events and people? One might just as well memorize telephone numbers. It didn't make any sense to me, and it seemed rather silly. My history teacher was not very fond of me.

I took advanced calculus as a freshman, which I was not supposed to do. On the first day of school, when I went to Nevanlinna to ask permission to take his course, he asked me, "Do you know any calculus?" "Oh, yes," I said, "I have studied calculus." I didn't tell him it was all on my own. Lindelöf did not like my jumping ahead, and he made me take all of the tests from the prerequisite courses that I had not attended. I liked advanced calculus; I was very interested in my work.

Zürich was my first encounter with mathematics as it should be taught. It was contemporary mathematics, not the history of mathematics as our courses usually were. In Zürich, Nevanlinna could talk on the research level, which made a completely different impression on me. I came to understand what mathematics was about, and that I was supposed to do mathematics, not just learn it. This had not been clear to me before.

I had the incredible luck of hitting upon a new approach, based on conformal mappings, which, with very considerable help from Nevanlinna and Pólya, led to a proof of the full conjecture.

Function theory already had a long tradition in Finland and Ahlfors began his career just after the first waves from the theory developed by his teacher, Rolf Nevanlinna, had crested. ... The main direction of Ahlfors's work was to return to the foundations of the subject, and view it from a more geometric (and differential geometric) point of view. This has provided the basis of almost all subsequent generalizations. We also find here the genesis of later work in quasiconformal mappings, conformal metrics and extremal length.

I was in for the surprise of my life when in 1936, at the International Congress in Oslo, I was told only hours before the ceremony that I was to receive one of the first two Fields medals ever awarded. The prestige was perhaps not yet the same as it is now, but in any case I felt singled out and greatly honoured. The citation by Carathéodory mentions explicitly my paper "Zur Theorie der Überlagerungsflächen," which threw some new light on Nevanlinna's theory of meromorphic functions. The award contributed in great measure to the confidence I felt in my work.

Little did I know at the time what an important role quasiconformal mappings would come to play in my own work.

Paradoxically I was myself able to do a lot of work during the war, although without the benefit of accessible libraries.

When I was able to leave Finland and go to Sweden, I was not allowed to take more than 10 crowns with me. So what did I do? I smuggled out my Fields Medal, and I pawned it! I'm sure it is the only Fields Medal that has been in a pawn shop. As soon as I got a little money some people in Sweden helped me retrieve it.

The plane was a reconditioned Flying Fortress, with perhaps a dozen passengers. It was not pressurised, and breathing was accomplished by individual oxygen masks. Life jackets were worn by all. Our children, ages 5 and 6, were quite capable of understanding the implications of danger.

My first disappointment came when I learned that I would be responsible for Descriptive Geometry, a subject that for some reason had survived in the Swiss high school and undergraduate curriculum. My second shock was that it was to be taught from 7 to 9 o'clock in the morning. Nevertheless, I slowly adjusted to my work, which even included some serious, although not very advanced, mathematics. Professor Fueter and his colleague Professor Finsler were getting on in years, and it became clear that the reason for inviting me was that no competent native successor was in sight. I took over a class of students in their formative years, and I am happy to say that many have remained my friends and are now important mathematicians in their own right. I cannot honestly say that I was happy in Zürich. The post-war era was not a good time for a stranger to take root in Switzerland. ... My wife and I did not feel welcome outside the circle of our immediate colleagues.

Ahlfors was very conscientious in meeting with his graduate students, but his role was largely reactive rather than presenting suggestions or ideas (at least in my case). In the spring of 1947 Ahlfors gave a course on the method of the extremal metric, which was then in its infancy. In the year 1947-48 he gave a course on the calculus of variations. In the year 1948-49 he gave a course on Riemann surfaces, directed largely to a generalization of his work on Schwarz's lemma to finite-bordered Riemann surfaces. Ahlfors did not conduct a regular seminar at any time during my stay. One year he gave a series of talks on Teichmüller's papers, probably with a view to preparing himself for his work on quasiconformal mappings.

... for seminal discoveries and the creation of powerful new methods in geometric function theory.

For over half a century the theory of functions of a complex variable was guided by the thought and work of Professor (Emeritus) Lars Ahlfors. His achievements include the proof of the Denjoy conjecture, the geometric derivation of the Nevanlinna theory, an important generalization of the Schwarz lemma, the development (with Beurling) of the method of extremal length, and numerous decisive results in the theories of Riemann surfaces, quasi-conformal mappings and Teichmuller spaces. Ahlfors celebrated finiteness theorem for Kleinian groups, and his work on the limit set, revitalized an important area of research. He is now doing pioneering work on quasiconformal deformations in higher dimensions. Ahlfors' influence was pervasive and beneficial. His methods combine deep geometric insight with subtle analytic skill; he presents them with utter clarity and simplicity. Time and again he attacked and solved the central problem in a discipline. Time and again other mathematicians were inspired by work he did many years earlier. Every complex analyst working today is, in some sense, his pupil.

It was my good fortune to know Lars Ahlfors for a quarter of a century. He was an inspiring mathematician and a very special person. His intuition for and joy in mathematics, combined with a great capacity for work, made him a harmonious craftsman through a career that spanned over sixty years. He savored the recognition and awards he received yet was very modest about his accomplishments. At a banquet celebrating his seventieth birthday Ahlfors said, "I liked to go fishing where the fish are, rather than trying exclusively for the big one."