economics profession around the world for his internationally acclaimed textbook, Elements of Econometrics (titled after Euclid's Elements) which was first published in 1971 and extensively revised in a 1986 second edition. Having been published in Spanish, Portuguese, Persian, and Croatian over the years, it is still available in English today. Initially econometrics was centered on providing essentially standalone solutions to particular problems e.g., a useful analytically and econometrically tractable production function such as the Cobb-Douglas, a formal development of the computationally expedient iterative estimation procedure, and a simple way to estimate the parameters of a mathematically complex function (to characterize the Cobb-Douglas, generalized regression, and CES publication examples cited above). As econometrics matured from a collection of clever solutions for specific problems into its own major field of research, econometricians worked to integrate what was known into a systematic whole greater than the sum of its parts. In addition to listing what might be called well-solved problems, they made explicit the implied assumptions underlying them, what can be said if the assumptions are not logically valid, and how to obtain useful results in these cases. With his focus on econometrics and a strong background in mathematics and statistics Kmenta was a major contributor to this effort. The book embodies the essence of Kmenta's approach to both econometrics and statistics which is perhaps best – if informally—characterized as "It's all very easy once you really understand it – don't bother memorizing anything, just do the algebra and think about what you are doing and why. Keep things as simple as possible." Early life Kmenta was enrolled as student of statistics at the Czech Technical University in Prague in 1948. He left the university in September 1949 following the 1948 communist coup in Czechoslovakia, escaping to West Germany where he lived in refugee camps for more than a year. He then emigrated to Australia in December 1950 under its two-year 'indentured labor' immigration policy. Kmenta was assigned to breaking rocks in a stone quarry in Picton (near Sydney). Later, he went to Sydney and met a professor at the Technical College in Ultimo who tested Kmenta's statistics training and immediately hired him to do statistical calculations. However, an employment officer in Sydney prevented the hiring due to his status as an immigrant and instead assigned him to a metal-stamping plant in Balmain. Kmenta learned English by listening to the radio and through