I have received kind and efficient assistance of the most diverse kind from many individuals in the course of the preparation of this book. They included Abrikosov, Alexei (Lemont, IL); Akhrem, Irena (Moscow); Allison, Robert (Chicago); Altshuler, Boris (New York City); Bakh, Abram (Moscow); Balaban, Alexandru (Galveston, TX); Bárány, Anders (Stockholm); Batalka, Krisztina (Budapest); Beck, Mihály (Budapest); Belyakov, Aleksandr (St. Petersburg); Berezanskaya, Valentina (Moscow); Bukatin, Michael (Waltham, MA); Christy, Peter (Los Altos, CA); Curl, Robert (Houston, TX); Dolnik, Milos (Waltham, MA); Dorman, Victoria (Princeton, NJ); Edelsack, Ed and Charlotte (Washington, DC); Efimenko, Lyudmila (St. Petersburg); Epstein, Irving (Waltham, MA); Galpern, Elena (Moscow); Gamow, R. Igor (Boulder, CO); Garwin, Richard (Scarsdale, NY); Gilead, Amihud (Haifa); the late Ginzburg, Vitaly; Gorelik, Gennady (Boston); Gorkov, Lev (Tallahassee, FL); Gorobets, Boris (Moscow); Hargittai, Balazs (Loretto, PA); Hargittai, Eszter (Evanston, IL); Herman, Zelek (Stanford, CA); Hoffmann, Roald (Ithaca, NY); Hurst, Phil (London); Kandror, Jan (Würzburg, Germany); Klein, Georg (Stockholm); Leggett, Anthony (Urbana, IL); Liberman, Mikhail (Uppsala, Sweden); Mackay, Alan (London); the late Mamedov, Khudu; Massa, Lou (New York); Noszticiusz, Zoltán (Budapest); Novakovskaya, Yulia (Moscow); Orbán, Miklós (Budapest); Ovchinnikova, Marina (née Zeldovich) (Moscow); Pickover, Clifford (Yorktown Heights, NY); Ronova, Inga (Moscow); Sakharova, Lyubov (Moscow); Sardanashvily, G. A. (Moscow); Semenov, Alexey (Moscow); the late Semenov, Nikolai; Senechal, Marjorie (Northampton, MA); Shevchenko, Vladimir (St. Petersburg); Shnol, Simon (Pushchino); the late Shoenberg, David; Silberer, Vera (Budapest); Simonovits, András (Budapest); Somorjai, Gabor (Berkeley, CA); Springer, George (Stanford, CA); Stepanov, Nikolai (Moscow); Szűcs, Judit (Budapest); Tamm, Nikita (Moscow); Tsyganova, Tatyana (St. Petersburg); Unna, Issachar (Jerusalem, Israel); Varga, Zoltán (Budapest and Minneapolis, MN); Varshavsky, Alexander (Pasadena, CA); Vernyi, Aleksandr (Moscow); the late Vilkov, Lev; Vilkova, Anna (Moscow); Zasourskaya, Larissa (Moscow); Zeldovich, Olga (Moscow); and the late Zhabotinsky, Anatol.
I owe special thanks to Bob Weintraub, Director of Library, Sami Shamoon College of Engineering (Beersheva and Ashdod, Israel); and Irwin Weintraub, Professor Emeritus of Brooklyn College, CUNY, now living in Beersheva, for tirelessly scrutinizing the entire text of the manuscript and for useful suggestions.
I am grateful to Jeremy Lewis, my editor at Oxford University Press (New York); for his trust and editorial guidance, to the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments, and to the copyeditor, Ginny Faber for care and attention.
As always, my wife, Magdi, has been an inspiration and a constructive critic in this project.
I acknowledge the general support of my work by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, and the generous specific support for this project by Oxford University Press (New York).