[1] Born in the Kingdom of Hungary into a Jewish family, Halmos immigrated to the United States at age 13.

Joseph L. Doob supervised his dissertation, titled Invariants of Certain Stochastic Transformations: The Mathematical Theory of Gambling Systems.

[3] Shortly after his graduation, Halmos left for the Institute for Advanced Study, lacking both job and grant money.

While at the Institute, Halmos wrote his first book, Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces, which immediately established his reputation as a fine expositor of mathematics.

In the American Scientist 56(4): 375–389 (Winter 1968), Halmos argued that mathematics is a creative art, and that mathematicians should be seen as artists, not number crunchers.

He discussed the division of the field into mathology and mathophysics, further arguing that mathematicians and painters think and work in related ways.

I think I know the answer: you have to be born right, you must continually strive to become perfect, you must love mathematics more than anything else, you must work at it hard and without stop, and you must never give up.

[8] In 1994, Halmos received the Deborah and Franklin Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics.