His family was, as he once told me, by tradition atheists for several generations. Like his mother, he felt profoundly Alsacian, but his father was a true Parisian boy with ancestors from the Massif central.

The adventure of the competition as well as giving me the joy of receiving the Mathematics Prize gave me in addition a new happiness, that of being able to solve, after several hours of a difficult test, a problem of a new style, and it was for my young age as a promise of success and future happiness. More than the satisfaction of receiving and celebrating a Prize, this mathematics prize I received then gave extreme value by the originality and interest of the test imposed on the candidate. Without going beyond the syllabus of geometry of the class of 'first C', the problem posed in the competition required candidates to study a very simple surface but extending to infinity; it was generated by the rotation of an unlimited line around another line of our space. During this difficult, beautiful and exciting event, I had, at a very young age, to fight with the only weapons at my disposal namely mathematical proof and logic, and to develop an intuition for our space beyond the too limited view that life daily gives us. In this way, I was forced to go beyond the real world, to build a complement created by the mind, science and reason. This Concours général was therefore for me and my future, more than a meritorious ordeal, it gave me an unforgettable lesson in introducing scientific creation beyond the daily intuition. And I admit that I still regret today that I do not know the author of the problem.

Néel's laboratory tries to establish links between laboratories and local industries, and Lelong, "supported by J Peres with whom he had been an assistant in Paris, strives to establish contact with engineers and classify their problems."

Appointed to Lille in 1946, Lelong focuses on his research and his students are then Parisian (François Norguet, for example, who began his studies in Lille, receiving in 1949-50 a "prix de licence"). ... Here is an example of a problem of rational mechanics taught in Lille, about 1954, by Pierre Lelong and Robert Bossut, at the time when Yves Leroy was a student: A 'gouttière' rotates uniformly around its centre of gravity, a ball circulates in its axis, give the movement of the ball.

I met Pierre Lelong for the first time, probably in the spring of 1946, at the ENS Garden Party. Although he had already achieved important results on entire functions and multisubharmonic functions and gained experience in university teaching, he behaved cordially, as an elder, but not as a master. That same year, he became a professor at the University of Lille. He started an analysis seminar in Paris with Gustave Choquet around this time. I attended the seminar in 1950-51 and, at the beginning of 1951, I proposed a title of a presentation on a result published in June. I gave a dozen presentations in one or other of these seminars, either on a topic requested or on personal results, until 1972.

Some describe the first seven years (1958-1965) as the golden age of research in France. ... Politics and science have a sense of reality, but they are not the same. The result is, and it became a principle, that General de Gaulle accepted that research activity can only be evaluated as to its proper quality by those who practise it themselves ...

... the mechanism of invention is complex, little explored, and, let us not forget it, there is no real research without researchers and the hazards inherent in research. ... One cannot do research without a qualified researcher.

I had the opportunity of meeting Professor Pierre Lelong in person for the first time in the spring of 1972 when I visited Paris VII for one semester. He was very approachable and humorous. Though at that time I was only a young mathematician, he made me feel completely at ease in our mathematical conversations. Since then I had many occasions to discuss mathematics with him at the meetings of the Lelong-Dolbeault-Skoda Seminar and other mathematics seminars in Paris and in many conferences such as the conference at Poitiers in 1972, the American Mathematical Society's twenty-third summer institute at Williams College in 1975, and Lelong's seventieth birthday conference at Wimereux in 1981. I greatly enjoyed and benefitted from these conversations. Each time not only did I learn to understand better from his perspective and gain more insight into his work, but I also came away with a deepened interest and greater enthusiasm for his theory of closed positive currents. His passion for the subject was infectious.

I first met Pierre Lelong during a conference on Several Complex Variables at the University of Maryland in the summer of 1970. ... I was a freshly minted Ph.D. and Pierre was, although I didn't know it at the time, close to sixty and a very important mathematician. I introduced myself, having been instructed to do so by my thesis advisor Leopoldo Nachbin, and although his English and my French were both, shall we say, laboured, he was friendly and talkative and we managed to communicate and keep communicating, without misunderstanding as far as I am aware, for over thirty years at conferences, meetings and private visits in the US, Brazil, Paris and Dublin. He visited Ireland as a tourist twice and enjoyed the music (it's different he said), the weather (it's also different), the driving (it's very different), the food (it's unusual) and the English (it's just like yours he said).

I wish to pay tribute to the memory of Pierre Lelong. One of the best mathematicians of the twentieth century has left us, whose influence will go on for a long time, but who was also an academic deeply wedded to humanistic values and to funding the values of the French Republic.