Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Journal of Approximation Theory 164 (2012) 211–217 www.elsevier.com/locate/jat Editorial A tribute to David Masson 1. Background David Masson was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada on February 6th, 1937. His family lived there until he was 12 when, shortly after his father’s death, David and his mother moved to Winnipeg. David earned a B.Sc. from the University of Manitoba in 1958, and an M.Sc. from McGill University the following year. His thesis was entitled Scattering of λ Particles by Nucleons and was completed under the supervision of Robert T. Sharp, a pioneer in Canadian theoretical physics [14]. David completed his doctoral dissertation Complex Angular Momentum at Imperial College (University of London) under the supervision of (later Nobel Laureate) Abdus Salam in 1963. Abdus Salam had become the youngest Fellow of the Royal Society in 1959. Concerning this period, Thomas Kibble 1 [10] writes: “Being a student of Salam’s was not an easy life; quite a few gave up and either abandoned research or found a less demanding supervisor. He himself worked incredibly hard and his students had to do so too. He expected to hear of daily progress and could be very dismissive of their efforts, but also very supportive of those who met his exacting standards.” David was to spend the rest of his career at the University of Toronto. For two years he was a Lecturer and Research Associate in the Department of Physics. In 1965 he moved to the Department of Mathematics as Assistant Professor, rising through the ranks to become Professor in 1977. He served as Associate Chair in the Department of Mathematics in the years 1987–1990. 2. High energy physics, mathematical physics Dating from his early years in Toronto are the theses of David’s two doctoral students, L.A. Copley (later Chair of Physics, Dean of Science and V.-P. (Academic) at Carleton University), “An investigation of symmetry breaking in elementary particle physics” (1968), and W.K. McClary, “The classical moment problem and quantum field theories in two space–time dimensions” (1972). At this stage one can see David taking advantage of his deep knowledge of 1 His father W.F. Kibble proved a famous multilinear generating function for Hermite polynomials in 1945. It is known as the Kibble–Slepian formula, [6, Theorem 4.7.2]. 0021-9045/$ - see front matter c ⃝ 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jat.2011.10.006