... is not only a first rate mathematician but also an excellent teacher. From 1945 to 1949 he taught in the Jewish high school for girls in Budapest. In one year he had 22 students. Six of them became mathematicians and one of them, Vera T Sós, became one of the leading mathematicians in Hungary.

[Gallai] taught me for four years from the age of fourteen. ... He gave some of us special tasks. He handed us the High School Mathematical Magazines, which only came as stencilled copies after the war. He sent us to competitions. Thanks to him, I was able to get to know Alfred Rényi, Rózsa Péter, and Paul Erdős when I was a high school student. But perhaps more importantly, it was Gallai who introduced me to the joy of understanding, of discovering, of the attractiveness of mathematics.

My university years were euphoric for me. Some of us were thrown into deep water: from my second year, I became an employee of Eötvös Loránd University as a demonstrator. ... it was typical of the conditions at the time that the mathematics departments were not as sharply separated as they are today. There was a Mathematics Institute and some departments. I was appointed to the Fejér Department. Before the war, and even for a year or two after, there were only two or three mathematicians full-time at the university. Since the 1950s, the structure of education has changed, with many students entering the university and the number of compulsory lectures and tutorials increasing. The new situation required more tutorial teachers. This is how I was able to conduct exercises in geometry, differential geometry, probability theory and analysis. I consider all of this lucky because that is how one really learns what one is able to understand in some way. I didn't teach algebra and number theory. Later I got close to number theory, but unfortunately not to algebra. Today, I admire the courage that I dared to teach with my second year head on so many topics.

... conversations with him were interesting and memorable, he felt what it was like to work around a problem, to solve a mathematics problem, and what was the beauty of mathematics. ... [He was an] open, sociable, helpful individual. He was a pianist, he was a friend of poets, he loved life.

We worked near Budapest, in a brick factory. There were some kilns where the bricks were made and some open storage yards where the bricks were stored. All the kilns were connected by rail with all the storage yards. The bricks were carried on small wheeled trucks to the storage yards. All we had to do was to put the bricks on the trucks at the kilns, push the trucks to the storage yards, and unload them there. We had a reasonable piece rate for the trucks, and the work itself was not difficult; the trouble was only at the crossings. The trucks generally jumped the rails there, and the bricks fell out of them; in short this caused a lot of trouble and loss of time which was precious to all of us. We were all sweating and cursing at such occasions, I too; but 'nolens volens' the idea occurred to me that this loss of time could have been minimised if the number of crossings of the rails had been minimised. But what is the minimum number of crossings? I realised after several days that the actual situation could have been improved, but the exact solution of the general problem with s kilns and t storage yards seemed to be very difficult. ... the problem occurred to me again ... at my first visit to Poland where I met Zarankiewicz. I mentioned to him my 'brick-factory' problem and Zarankiewicz thought he had solved it. But Gerhard Ringel found a gap in his published proof, which nobody has been able to fill so far - in spite of much effort. This problem has also become a notoriously difficult unsolved problem.

Sós's energy and her dedication to the causes of the mathematical community have been extraordinary. She is unequalled in the constant attention she has devoted to promising students. In 1965 she initiated and launched the famous weekly Hajnal-Sós seminar at the Mathematical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. For the past three decades, that seminar has been a major forum for new results in combinatorics, often made by young mathematicians, including undergraduate students. Since the mid sixties, Sós has been the driving force behind the periodic international conferences in combinatorics under the auspices of the Bolyai Society. Hungary was then a meeting place between East and West. ... These meetings helped combinatorists from the Soviet bloc, especially Hungarians, build personal contacts with colleagues world wide at a time when travel to the West was extremely limited.

... in July 1976, at the meeting on combinatorics at Orsay in Paris, Vera Sós gave me the terrible news (which she had known for six years) that Paul had leukaemia. She told me that I should visit him as soon as possible and that I should be careful in talking to him because he did not know the true nature of his illness. My first reaction was to say that perhaps he should have been told ... She said that Paul loved life too much and with a death sentence hanging over him would not be able to live and work very well. ... I am now fairly sure that her decision was right, since he clearly never tried to find out the true nature of his illness. In fact a few days before his death Vera and their son George (also a mathematician) tried to persuade him to dictate some parts of his book to Halász or Pintz. He refused saying "I will write it when I feel better and stronger." Unfortunately he never had the chance. Fortunately his book was finished by his students G Halász and J Pintz ...

The joy of knowing, understanding, and creating is common to all the sciences. There are different ways to find the truth. In mathematics, strict logical inference will lead to the proving or refutation of a conjecture. Sitting here in a room, regardless of the outside world, I can decide whether or not it is true. This in itself is attractive, as there is so much uncertainty in the world.

Mathematics, like the whole world, has changed in many ways. Mathematics has broadened, it has changed in quantity and in character. The topics studied, the nature and style of research, the relationship between mathematics and the natural and social sciences have changed ... Everybody's expectations have changed, the world of science, of mathematicians, and obviously the research spirit, has changed, since the age into which we are born, it also shapes our personality. There has been an explosion in science, an incredible race. The change is also signalled by the fact that becoming a mathematician has become an occupation. Sixty years ago, this was not the case. Only a few mathematicians worked at the Budapest University of Technology and the University of Technology. They didn't need a degree in mathematics.

Research has changed in both quantity and quality. ... The world, its values, the attitude to life, have changed. The explosive growth created a high degree of specialisation. At the same time, the complexity of profound results and their proofs presupposes the unity of mathematics, the recognition of the relation between seemingly completely separate areas of mathematics, and the joint possession of their knowledge. Managing and controlling this two-way trend is a fundamental issue.

The nature and importance of mathematicians' cooperation has changed. There had been joint research in the past, but more often it was the simultaneous, independent discovery of the same result or the advancement of alternate steps based on each other's work. Over the last few decades, handwritten mail has been replaced by communication within seconds. This, and internationally funded projects, put cooperation in a different role. Why would mathematicians stay in an "ideal" state when they might say: I don't care about the outside world, I don't care how much support I get for my research, how much I get paid, I don't care if I have an apartment, I don't care if I can give my children food or not, I just care about proving a theorem. Talent and dedication are a necessary but less and less sufficient condition for being a researcher.