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Interview with Alois Kufner on theOccasion of his 80th BirthdayInterviewLuboš Pick (Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic)Alois Kufner (born 1 February1934 in Pilsen, CzechRepublic) is a professor ofmathematics at the MathematicalInstitute of theAcademy of Sciences of theCzech Republic in Prague.He was the director of thisinstitute from 1979 to 1990.He is the author of manybooks. His research interestsinclude mainly the theory offunction spaces and its applications.For many years he worked in the central bodiesof the Union of Czech Mathematicians and Physicists. Hehas spent a lot of effort working for the benefit of talentedyoung mathematicians.Do you still remember when and why you decided tobecome a mathematician?That happened against my own will. I wanted to becomea high-school teacher of mathematics and physics. HenceI applied as an undergraduate to the Faculty of Mathematicsand Physics at Charles University in Prague. Butexactly in that very year, the study programme for teacherswas carried over to a different faculty, specifically thePedagogical Faculty of the same university. In order tofollow my plan, I would have to change my application.But my teacher at the secondary school talked me out ofit and I ended up studying mathematics.The supervisor of your PhD thesis was Jindřich Nečas.Was collaboration with him exciting? Who else had influenceon your choice of research area?Let me first slightly correct you. My diploma thesis wason singular integral equations and my supervisor was JanPotoček. He had two diploma students and only one PhDposition. He offered that Ivo Babuška could take one ofthem over to his department of PDEs in the academy,and Babuška chose me. This resulted in my very first job,and I did the doctorate simultaneously with it. Babuška’sdepartment was quite impressive and the work was interesting.At that time, Sobolev spaces and functionalanalyticsolutions of PDEs were the cutting edge of researchin analysis, and I happily joined in. Nečas was amember of that department and worked with me in aninformal way. He pointed me towards applications ofweighted spaces, which has been my principal researchtopic ever since. I also collaborated with several studentsfrom Charles University, where Nečas had a part-timejob. In this way, I encountered nonlinear equations. Col-laboration with Nečas definitely had significant impact onme. Aside from him and Potoček, I consider also SergeyMikhailovich Nikolskii and Sergey L’vovich Sobolev myequally important (though rather remote) teachers.You authored an impressive array of books and monographs.Do you still remember the first one of them?Which of your books is your favourite one?I prefer books with an impact on the general public ratherthan monographs specialised in a narrow field. That’swhy I wrote three little books for the “School of YoungMathematicians”. My first book was a compendium onFourier series, written jointly with Jan Kadlec. Oddlyenough, it is one of my most cited ones. It is difficult tosay which of my books I like most: perhaps “Geometryof Hilbert Space” (in Czech), in which my main goal wasto explain to a wide range of readers (including studentsand applied people) the basics of functional analysis.You founded the “Prague school of function spaces”,now quite well known in the world. How did it allstart?I first studied Sobolev spaces in connection with PDEs.When Nečas moved to the USA in 1968, we began, togetherwith his students Oldřich John and SvatoplukFučík, studying function spaces systematically. We establishedan informal seminar. Later it moved from the universityto the academy and that was exactly the momentwhen the Prague school began. Its first generation wasformed by our diploma students.You rebuilt a once purely service Department of Mathematicsat the University of Pilsen into one of the bestmathematics departments in the country. How did youmanage it?I did not really build it – that is exaggerated. Severalquite able people had been there from the very beginning.I got there by accident. In 1972, during my militaryservice in Pilsen, I visited Jiří Holenda, a schoolmate ofmine from university. He persuaded me to invest timeand effort into reorganising their department, which thenseemed rather incoherent. I organised seminars on PDEsthere and I tried to attract some dedicated young people.Then the process started to run on its own. The expertiseand organising abilities of other people such as StanislavMíka, Pavel Drábek and Jiří Holenda significantly contributedto the rise and glory of the Pilsen department.During your directorship of the Mathematical Instituteof the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, in the middleof a politically difficult period, you kept some peopleEMS Newsletter June 2014 45