We came to this neighbourhood, Villa Muñoz, when I was 10 years old. We came from Poland; Jewish-Polish who did not speak a word of Spanish.

Engineers Julio Ricaldoni and Oscar Maggiolo led a progressive group of teachers, for many years a minority. Mario Wschebor, shortly after entering the Faculty, along with Luis Osin, several years older than him, were student representatives on one of those councils made up of a professional majority. On one occasion there was strong questioning the renewal of the position of Rafael Laguardia, whose tireless dedication to the training of mathematicians was not well appreciated by that majority. The fiery defence of Luis and Mario, together with the teaching minority, finally achieved victory after a long process and that is probably one of the milestones in Mario's career as a representative of Students of the Faculty.

The subjugation of the universities of both the United States and Latin America to purposes specifically linked to the military or economic expansion or preservation of the empire, even though it dates back two or three decades, has only been addressed very recently, particularly as a result of the latest cases of foreign intervention in the life of underdeveloped countries. Wschebor's essay, despite its brevity, manages to accurately place the imperialist cultural tactic of the United States in its general environment. Institutionalised education is only one aspect of the general programme for the formation of people's consciences and, in the capitalist world, propaganda has become a first-class instrument to determine uses and customs, and fix a perception of reality that favours the ruling classes. The problem stems from the growing militarisation of science in the United States. The author gives a significant figure: in 1962, 90 percent of Washington government spending on science was for military purposes ...

I met Mario Wschebor and we got married, we went to live in the most beautiful square in Montevideo, in Parra del Riego. Mario was a militant, half his life was militant, and he studied, and after going away and coming back, we decided to leave ... we were worried about the political situation, which was not that bad yet ... Mario entered a competition at the Centre for Mathematics in the Engineering Faculty when the opportunity arose to have a scholarship in France. Laguardia, that wonderful man who directed the Mathematics Centre at that time, had obtained scholarships to study in France for mathematicians. Mario had the opportunity to present himself and he won. ... I didn't have a scholarship at first; I went to France by ship and Mario on a plane together with other colleagues. Mario's scholarship was small, so we lived very frugally.

I thank J-P Kahane for his guidance and his remarks during my work.

If T is the unit circle and $B_{n}$ a given sequence of subsets of T, we consider the problem of covering T with random independent uniform translates of $B_{n}$. The technique used is based on a theorem on rearrangements of functions.

The decision to return was difficult, because the situation [in Uruguay] was horrible, there were many friends in prison. Everyone told us not to come back ... . But we felt terrible guilt about abandoning our country and as soon as we could we returned. ... We took a ship from Nice, I remember some large trunks of things we had bought, always afraid, but nothing happened on arrival. And well, then we tried to organise our life here. ...

I went back to work at the Architecture Department until the military intervention [of 28 October], then everything went to hell. They started looking for Mario, they went to look for him in an apartment that we had sold ... things got worse and worse. ... Mario was imprisoned, but only for 24 hours. And there were so many people who were taken away in those days ... We went to Buenos Aires and spent fifteen days thinking about what to do, friends told us not to come back, the coup in Chile was coming, they wanted us to go to the Venezuelan Embassy ... But finally we came back to Uruguay, very frightened, and well, we dedicated ourselves to not talking much and to being half hidden. Mario was left without a job, the Institute of Mathematics closed. ... We decided to go to Buenos Aires, and right away our second child Margarita Maria was born.

In the middle of the first semester of 1987 Wschebor took over a course in Probability and Statistics. Attending his classes was a real treat. An extremely profound knowledge, accompanied by the most absolute clarity and prolixity when speaking and writing, with such enthusiasm for what he taught that every now and then he was won over by passion, his eyes shone with intensity, he gesticulated, raising his left hand as if he were holding some imaginary object to emphasise the relevance of a concept. When Mario taught a course he did not teach Mathematics: he lived it and recreated it, his story took you to the very sources of the various concepts and made you feel part of that gigantic collective construction.

He never made me study "his problems", those that were part of or had fallen by the wayside in his agenda as a researcher, which is what many advisors do. No, he wanted me to follow my own ideas as much as possible. At the time I didn't fully understand it and even at times it bothered me. Over the years, again, I realised his generosity. He didn't want me to be his appendix, but rather for me to have an academic personality of my own. The attitude of a genuine teacher.

His research activity falls within the area of probability and statistics. Beginning with Fourier series and circle covering problems with random intervals (his doctoral thesis topic), he made important contributions to the problem of the distribution of the supremum of a random process, both in the one-dimensional and multidimensional cases, among which stands out a series of works on problems of crosses and level sets, together with Enrique Cabaña, for which he received an award from the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas (CONICIT) of Venezuela in 1981. In these investigations he used and generalized Rice's formula. He was also interested in the properties of regularity of the trajectories of stochastic processes, the local time of the processes, the key problem of the observation of an irregular process and the mathematical models of trajectory regularisation, and local time approximation, as well as related process problems in statistics. More recently, inspired by problems posed by Stephen Smale, he became interested in the solutions of random systems of equations and the complexity associated with determining them, for which he again used Rice's formula. His most recent works fall in this direction, especially those co-authored with Jean-Marc Azaïz and Felipe Cucker. Rice's method of Azaïs and Wschebor for the study of the distribution of the maximum of a random process is presented in the book "Level sets and extreme of random processes and fields", in collaboration with Azaïs, edited in 2009 by Wiley.

The book is a very valuable addition to the literature on Gaussian processes, random fields and extreme value theory. It is well written and self-contained and presents a significant number of detailed and original applications to genomics, oceanography, the study of systems of random equations and condition numbers of random matrices. In comparison with another recent book [R J Adler and J E Taylor (2007)], this book has a distinct analytic rather than geometric flavour, making it more accessible to audiences with no background in differential geometry ... . Since the approaches adopted in these two books are very different and there is generally little overlap in the material, the two books complement each other well. Another valuable feature of the book under review, both from the self-study point of view and for its use as a textbook in graduate classes, is the inclusion of end-of-chapter exercises. The latter not only reinforce the material presented but also expose readers to a variety of new topics and ideas.

... dared to say things that not everyone understood and that many tried to hide under from the carpet, hide them or shut them up; however, they had the courage to keep saying them. What's more, many times they said things that their own colleagues and co-religionists did not understand, did not see or did not want to see, about the reality of the university of our country.

For me, Mario was always a top-level reference in educational matters, especially in university studies. He would say that we felt a mutual affection and, therefore, a few months ago I called him on the phone, among other things, to apologise because I had not gone to see him due to his illness. He answered by roaring with laughter and making countless jokes to me - I still hear him laugh - so that I would calm down and not feel guilty for not having gone to visit him. A few weeks ago, Clara, my wife, met our dear friend Adela Pellegrino and told me: "You have to go see him." Precisely, that he was about to leave us and, in truth, I did not think that he was going to die so quickly. I couldn't get to see him, and I was very sorry when another friend called me on Friday, 16 September, Diana Reches - also known as Diane Denoir - who asked me in an anguished, hard and firm tone: "Do you know? Did you hear? You knew it?" She later told me: "Mario died." As moved as I am to say it right now, I was moved to hear it, because I didn't expect him to pass away so soon, even though I knew he wasn't well.

Another thing that deeply caught my attention was his Curriculum Vitae, which I had the opportunity to read when we decided to pay this tribute. I realised that there was a Mario Wschebor that I did not know, because the truth is that it is an impressive résumé. I have been a parliamentarian for almost twenty-two years and I have paid many tributes to different personalities in the country, but I have never found a résumé with the level, depth and characteristics of Mario Wschebor's. Surely I didn't know because Mario never talked about these issues. He was such a simple person, that I had not realised that I had a friend who was really a world-class scientist, both for his studies - recognised in the diplomas, prizes and distinctions he obtained -, and for his teaching work, which he practiced in countless countries around the world, and for the number of scientific publications he had made. I would say that Mario Wschebor was a scientist, an intellectual, a fighter and a militant for causes, which he defended with conviction, with great passion and great tenacity.