Hace 50 años tenía 50 años [Fifty years ago he was fifty years old]

Fifty Years Ago: Topology of Manifolds in the 50’s and 60’s

A number of mathematicians worked on 3-dimensional manifolds in the 50’s. (I was certainly one of them.) But I believe that the most important contribution was made by just one person. Christos Papakyriakopoulos had no regular academic position, and worked very much by himself, concentrating on old and difficult problems. We were both in Princeton during this period, and I saw him fairly often,...

Tuberculosis in Indian Prisons Fifty Years Ago

The evacuation of Burma: fifty years ago.

When asked to write a few notes about my spell in Burma, April and May 1942, I had to read again Field Marshal Sir William Slim's book, especially the first part of "Defeat into Victory", in order to refresh my memory with the dates and place names in Burma with which I was concerned. It is hard to believe that it took place 50 years ago and one gets no younger in body and mind.

Some biophysical experiments from fifty years ago.

Georg von Bekesy died June 13, 1972. In early March of that year, the Editors and Editorial Committee members of the Annual Review of Physiology invited him to write the prefatory chapter for this 1974 volume. He accepted promptly and added "I am sure I will have it finished long before your deadline of June 1973." He mailed us his completed manuscript three weeks later, early in April 1972, tw...

Great Ormond Street 50 years ago.

I was appointed house physician at The Hospital for Sick Children in 1937. In retrospect I can see that I was there at a very particular time in the hospital's history, because 1937 was to mark the end of an era. A decade or so before, the fame of Great Ormond Street had depended on a generation of physicians of the calibre of Still, Garrod, Batten, and Poynton. But the staffing of the hospital...