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Shimon Vega was born in Amsterdam on November 14, 1943 and passed away two days after his 78th birthday.  As he would later say: “This was not a good time and place for a Jewish child to be born, and led to what perhaps was the most ‘interesting’ part of my life”.  At the age of 6 weeks he was sent to a hideout with a Dutch family until the end of the war, thus surviving the Holocaust. He grew up in Ouderkerk aan de Amstel, a small village south of Amsterdam. After obtaining both his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Physics in Holland he moved to Israel with his wife Margrit, and completed his Ph.D. with Prof. Zeev Luz at the Weizmann Institute on Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance. Shimon stood out already during his PhD, where he published his thesis papers as a sole author with the full encouragement of his advisor. This work was the beginning of a joint tackling of the theoretical and experimental chemical physics underlying magnetic resonance. After PhD graduation Shimon became Alex Pines’ first postdoc at Berkeley, where they made pioneering discoveries in the new field of multiple-quantum NMR. This work would eventually lead to setting the basis for the fictitious-spin-½ formalism, nowadays a primary tool for understanding NMR in solids and liquids and gaining recognition in EPR and quantum optics.