Hrushikesh Mhaskar (b. 1956, Pune, India) did his undergraduate studies in Institute of Science, Nagpur, and received his first M. Sc. in mathematics from the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai in 1976. He received his Ph. D. in mathematics and M. S. in computer science from the Ohio State University, Columbus, in 1980. He then joined Cal. State L. A., and was promoted to full professor in 1990. After retirement in 2012, he is now a visiting associate at California Institute of Technology, Research Professor at Claremont Graduate University, and occasionally serves as a consultant for Qualcomm. He has published more than 125 refereed articles in the area of approximation theory, potential theory, neural networks, wavelet analysis, and data processing. His book,“Weighted polynomial approximation”, was published in 1997 by World Scientific, and the book with Dr. D. V. Pai, “Fundamentals of Approximation Theory” was published by Narosa Publishers, CRC, and Alpha Science in 2000. He serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Approximation Theory and Jaen Journal of Approximation. In addition, he was a co-editor of a special issue of Advances in Computational Mathematics on mathematical aspects of neural networks, as well as two edited collections of research articles: Wavelet Analysis and Applications, Narosa Publishers, 2001, and Frontiers in interpolation and approximation, Chapman and Hall/CRC, 2006. He has held visiting positions, as well as given several invited lectures throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. He was awarded the Humboldt Fellowship for research in Germany four times. He was John von Neumann distinguished professor at Technical University of Munich in 2011. He is listed in Outstanding Young Men of America (1985) and Who’s Who in America’s Teachers (1994). His research was supported currently by the National Science Foundation and the U. S. Army Research Office, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Security Agency, and the Research and Development Laboratories.