mathematics for 40 years. Earliest contributions Plemelj had shown his great gift for mathematics early in elementary school. He mastered the whole of the high school syllabus by the beginning of the fourth year and began to tutor students for their graduation examinations. At that time he discovered alone series for sin x and cos x. Actually he found a series for cyclometric function arccos x and after that he just inverted this series and then guessed a principle for coefficients. Yet he did not have a proof for that. Plemelj had great joy for a difficult constructional tasks from geometry. From his high school days originates an elementary problem — his later construction of regular sevenfold polygon inscribed in a circle otherwise exactly and not approximately with simple solution as an angle trisection which was yet not known in those days and which necessarily leads to the old Indian or Babylonian approximate construction. He started to occupy himself with mathematics in fourth and fifth class of high school. Beside in mathematics he was interested also in natural science and especially astronomy. He studied celestial mechanics already at high school. He liked observing the stars. His eyesight was so sharp he could see the planet Venus even in the daytime. Research Plemelj's main research interests were the theory of linear differential equations, integral equations, potential theory, the theory of analytic functions, and functional analysis. Plemelj encountered integral equations while still a student at Göttingen, when the Swedish professor Erik Holmgren gave a lecture on the work of his fellow countryman Fredholm on linear integral equations of the 1st and 2nd kind. Spurred on by Hilbert, Göttingen mathematicians attacked this new area of research and Plemelj was one of the first to publish original results on the question, applying the theory of integral equations to the study of harmonic functions in potential theory. His most important work in potential theory is summarised in his 1911 book Potentialtheoretische Untersuchungen (Studies in Potential Theory), which received the Jablonowski Society award in Leipzig (1500 marks), and the Richard Lieben award from the University of Vienna (2000 crowns) for the most outstanding work in the field of pure and applied mathematics written by any kind of 'Austrian' mathematician in the previous three years. His most original contribution is the elementary solution he provided for the Riemann–Hilbert problem f+ = g f− about the existence of