At a meeting in Moscow in June 2005, Gil Strang suggested that there be a collection of Gene Golub's work to highlight his many important contributions to numerical analysis. The three of us were honored to undertake this pleasant task, with publication timed for February "29", 2007, the 75th anniversary of Gene's birth. Gene chose 21 papers to include here, and we are grateful to the publishers for permission to reprint these works. We asked each of the coauthors to write about how the paper came to be written. These short essays reveal a lot about Gene's working style - his quickness and creativity, his ability to draw.
