Walter Gautschi was a research mathematician at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., and at Oak Ridge National Laboratory before taking on a full professorship at Purdue University, where he remained until his retirement in 2000. Previously he held postdoctoral positions at the Istituto Nazionale per le Applicazioni del Calcolo (INAC) in Rome and at Harvard University. Elected Corresponding Member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Foreign Member of the Turin Academy of Sciences, Gautschi has served on the editorial committees of several journals and was chairman of the Mathematics of Computation editorial board. He has published extensively in the areas of computational mathematics, orthogonal polynomials, and history, including two books.