Dedicated with great pleasure to Eduard Tsekanovskii on the occasion of his 80th birthday.Abstract. In 1961, Birman proved a sequence of inequalities {In}, for n ∈ N, valid for functions in C n 0 ((0, ∞)) ⊂ L 2 ((0, ∞)). In particular, I 1 is the classical (integral) Hardy inequality and I 2 is the well-known Rellich inequality. In this paper, we give a proof of this sequence of inequalities valid on a certain Hilbert space; as a consequence of this inclusion, we see that the classical Hardy inequality implies each of the inequalities in Birman's sequence. We also show that for any finite b > 0, these inequalities hold on the standard Sobolev space H n 0 ((0, b)). Furthermore, in all cases, the Birman constants [(2n − 1)!!] 2 /2 2n in these inequalities are sharp and the only function that gives equality in any of these inequalities is the trivial function in L 2 ((0, ∞)) (resp., L 2 ((0, b))). We also show that these Birman constants are related to the norm of a generalized continuous Cesàro averaging operator whose spectral properties we determine in detail.