Frigyes Riesz attended high school in Győr, where Dániel Arany taught. When Dániel Arany started the Secondary School Mathematical Journals, Frigyes Riesz was 14 years old. The journal started at the best moment for him. Two years later, however, Dániel Arany left the faculty, and was replaced by an ambitious, young teacher, Zoltán Kovács, who had graduated from university under the spell of Loránd Eötvös and preferred natural sciences to quantitative sciences. He soon began writing textbooks, and soon his textbook "Physics for the Upper Secondary School Classes" was used in various secondary schools across the country. We do not know the details of the process that may have taken place between the new physics teacher and a talented student interested in mathematics, but it is a fact that most of the sample solutions to physics problems posted in Lapok in 1896/97 were sent in by Frigyes Riesz. It cannot be a coincidence that after graduating from high school, Riesz enrolled at the Zurich University of Technology and even sent solutions to Lapok from there.

Following the fundamental work of Clebsch in the theory of plane curves of the third order, Harnack and others have constructed the homogeneous coordinates of the points of a fourth order space-curve of the first kind as different elliptic functions of a parameter; the common property of these constructions is that the intersections of the curve with an arbitrary algebraic surface are characterised by the relation that the sum of their parameters is periodic. This relation, reducing the investigation of the configurations of the curve to the investigation of number-theoretical congruences, has led to conclusions that are considerably simpler and more transparent than geometric conclusions; and indeed, the greater part of the results concerning these configurations have been provided by analytical investigations; the analytical method has soon built up a whole system of theorems for which the geometric method could scarcely provide the basis. It seems that this system has now been completed by means of analytical investigations; at least there is no prospect of any important, substantially new results. If I nevertheless measure my subject from such a revised circle, I do so because the task is only seemingly thankless: for the theory of point configurations of a curve is by no means finished. The mathematician has the double task of searching for facts and investigating the connection between the facts found and those already known; of inserting the found into a coherent system without contradiction. We have found the greater part of the results analytically, because invention is easier in this way; but by the nature of the subject of our theory, geometry, or, with even greater restriction, the investigations devoid of all metric character, belongs to the framework of positional geometry.

I begin by explaining in what sense I am speaking of continuity here today. To have a point of reference, I refer to those investigations into the foundations of geometry that place continuity, or more precisely, the concept of a continuously extended manifold, at the forefront of their assumptions. The best known are those of Riemann, Lie, and Hilbert. In Riemann's work, the concept of a continuously extended manifold is still somewhat vague; in Lie's, at least to the extent that it is used, it is defined to such an extent that it is implicitly contained in the analytical formulation of the problem. However, the essential point - namely, that this conceptualisation is primarily a definition of the limiting element, or more generally, a definition of the point of condensation - only emerges with sufficient clarity in Hilbert's work. The definition of the concept of the condensation point is achieved there by postulating a possibility of mapping the structures under consideration onto certain manifolds of numbers, which mapping also fulfils certain specified conditions; however, the concept of the condensation point is already defined for those manifolds of numbers.

At the International Mathematical Congress in Rome held in 1908, Riesz formulated the axioms of a topological space, directly axiomatizing the concept of limit point and in this way arrived at the class of topological spaces which took a definitive place in modern topology under the name of the class of $T_{1}$-spaces. Thus, science can thank Frigyes Riesz for the first successful introduction of the concept of topological space.

The Romanian army in charge of occupying the city, together with those of our own compatriots of Romanian nationality wishing the unification of Transylvania (and therefore of a great part of Hungary) with the Romanian Kingdom, have cut us off from all means of communication with the rest of the world. Therefore, for the last three months I have not had any news at all either from my brother, who teaches in the Hogskola in Stockholm, nor from my mother and my sister, who live in western Hungary, 500 kilometres away from here, and who must be suffering cruelly under this cursed Bolshevistic movement. I have been deprived of mail for months. No newspapers, except for some Romanian newspapers, not even scientific journals! They have to be destroyed at the post office, a gap that will be very difficult to fill later! But this is only a silliness compared with recent events. On the 10th of this month, the Romanians, supported by military force, have declared that our university property belongs to the Romanian state.The professors have been asked to swear an oath of loyalty to the Romanian state and its king. And as we - leaning on the prescriptions of international law - unanimously declined such a betrayal of our fatherland, the university was beleaguered unexpectedly on the 12th of this month, 48 hours after the delivery of their request, during classes, using military force, the professors were banished from their institutes, our scientific equipment was taken, and about 2000 students were dispersed as a consequence of the immediate suspension of all university affairs!

In his inaugural speech as university rector in 1925, which he gave under the title "Elementary Methods in Higher Mathematics", Frigyes Riesz demonstrated, using examples from higher mathematics, that in science "higher", "complicated", and "difficult" are not permanent adjectives, and that what is still such today may become "elementary", "simple", and "easy" tomorrow.

In his lecture at the 1928 International Congress of Mathematicians in Bologna, Riesz pointed out that the relevant parts of linear operations of continuous functions can be characterised and generated without using the Stieltjes integral. His method is based on the concept of the majorant operation. His basic theorem is that any majorant set of linear operations always has a smallest majorant. His method has the great advantage that it is completely general, so that it can be applied not only to linear operations of continuous functions, but also to functions interpreted on arbitrary abstract sets.

... even among the excellent ones, a mathematician stands out, who, if we look at the weight of his pure mathematical discoveries and the time-tested nature of these, as well as the multitude of all his merits, is currently unmatched by anyone else.

The work of F Riesz is not only distinguished by the genuine importance of his results, but also by his aesthetic discernment in mathematical taste and diction. ... The more leisurely mastership of F Riesz's style, whether he writes in his native Hungarian, or in French or German, conveys such pleasure and is to the older mathematician a nostalgic remainder of what we are in danger to lose. For him there was no mere abstraction for the sake of a structure theory, and he was always turning back to the applications in some concrete and substantial situation.

Here, in the first half written by himself, we find the old master picturing to us Real Analysis as he saw it, lovingly, leisurely, and with the discerning eye of an artist. This book, I have no doubt, will remain a classic in the treasure house of mathematical literature. With it, and with all his other work, will live the memory of Frederic Riesz as a great and fertile mathematician for long in the history of our art.

... his earlier discoveries have had such a profound and far-reaching impact, and during this time he has paved the way for so many new research directions that have already sparked the most lively scientific movement, and that Frigyes Riesz is now recognised by mathematicians all over the world as a leading mathematician of the first order. ... The Riesz-Fischer theorem had already had numerous notable applications, but now it has been shown that in theoretical physics Heisenberg quantum mechanics is equivalent to Schrödinger quantum mechanics, and the old Riesz theorem provides the basis for proving this very important fact. ... As a researcher, teacher, and journal editor, Frigyes Riesz devotes all his strength to the service of his country, of which he is proud to be one of its foremost scientists.