Personal reflections on an unintentional behavioral scientist

It is unlikely that prior to reaching age 40 János Aczél anticipated any challenging questions about functional equations arising from the behavioral and social sciences. Yet, increasingly, behavioral and social scientists have come up with difficult equations. To be sure, the earliest equations we encountered were largely familiar and were covered in his treatise (Aczél (1961, 1966)). But some after that proved to be much more unusual and challenging. My focus here is on both our first few years of interaction and on the last six years. Our recent collaboration has been greatly facilitated by the fact that since retirement János has elected to spend winters visiting the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. The in-between period, during which János made substantial contributions to behavioral questions, I do not cover for two reasons: I do not know that research very completely and it is well documented elsewhere (Aczél (1987, 1995, 1997)).