Philip Holgate (1934-1993)

Philip Holgate was born in Chesterfield on 8 December 1934.His family moved from Derbyshire to Devon in 1945, and he waseducated at Newton Abbot Grammar School from 1945 to 1952, andthe University College of the South-West (now Exeter University,but which then awarded London degrees) from 1952 to 1955. Hequalified as both a teacher (King's College, London, 1955–56)and a statistician (University College, London, 1956–57). After teaching mathematics and physics at Burgess Hill School,in Hampstead and then in Borehamwood, Philip joined the StatisticsSection at Rothamsted Experimental Station (1961–62).He then spent five years in the Biometrics Section of the NatureConservancy. His first publications date from this period, andthe interests he acquired then were to develop into what becamehis most enduring, and distinctive, scientific interests. Philip joined the Department of Statistics, Birkbeck College,University of London, in 1967, and remained at Birkbeck forthe rest of his career, until his death from a heart attackon 13 April 1993.     

Eric John Fyfe Primrose (1920-1998)

Eric Primrose was appointed to a Lectureship in Pure Mathematicsat the University College, Leicester, in 1947 and promoted toa Senior Lectureship in 1954. He came to Leicester direct fromOxford where he had spent the 1946–47 year completinghis degree, which had been interrupted by war service. Ericwas awarded his PhD in 1957 by the University of London. Eric's secondary education was at Chigwell School and in 1939he won an Open Scholarship in Mathematics and went up to StJohn's College, Oxford. He took ‘shortened finals’in 1941 and then entered the RAF as a Technical Officer (Radar),reaching the rank of Flight Lieutenant, having served in variouslocations throughout Europe.     

My agents love to conform: Norms and emotion in the micro-macro link

This contribution investigates the function of emotion in relation to norms, both in natural and artificial societies. We illustrate that unintentional behavior can be normative and socially functional at the same time, thereby highlighting the role of emotion. Conceiving of norms as mental objects we then examine the role of emotion in maintaining and enforcing such propositional attitudes. The findings are subsequently related to social structural dynamics and questions concerning micro-macro linkage, in natural societies as well as in artificial systems. Finally, we outline the possibilities of an application to the socionic multi-agent architecture SONAR. Christian von Scheve graduated in Sociology with minors in Psychology, Economics, and Political Science at the University of Hamburg, where he also worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Sociology. Currently, he is a 3rd year PhD student at the University of Hamburg. He was a Fellow of the Research Group “Emotions as Bio-Cultural Processes” at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at Bielefeld University. In his doctoral thesis he develops an interdisciplinary approach to emotion and social structural dynamics, integrating emotion theories from the neurosciences, psychology, and the social sciences. He has published on the role of emotion in large-scale social systems, human-computer interaction, and multi-agent systems. He is co-editor of a forthcoming volume on emotion regulation. Daniel Moldt received his BSc in Computer Science/Software Engineering from the University of Birmingham (England) in 1984, graduated in Informatics at the University of Hamburg, with a minor in Economics in 1990. He received his PhD in Informatics from the University of Hamburg in 1996, where he has been a researcher and lecturer at the Department of Informatics since 1990. Daniel Moldt is also the head of the Laboratory for Agent-Oriented Systems (LAOS) of the theoretical foundations group at the Department of Informatics. His research interests focus on theoretical foundations, software engineering and distributed systems with an emphasis on agent technology, Petri nets, specification languages, intra- and inter-organizational application development, Socionics and emotion in informatics. Julia Fix is currently a PhD student at the Theoretical Foundations of Computer Science Group, Department for Informatics at the University of Hamburg. She studied Informatics and Psychology at the University of Hamburg, with an emphasis on theoretical foundations of multi-agent systems and wrote her diploma theses about emotional agent systems. Her current research interests focus on conceptual challenges and theoretical foundations of modelling emotions in multi-agent systems, emotion-based norm enforcement and maintenance, and Socionics. A further research focus are Petri nets, in particular the use of Petri-net modelling formalisms for representing different aspects of emotion in agent systems. Rolf von Lüde is a professor of Sociology at the University of Hamburg with a focus in teaching and research in Sociology of Organizations, Work and Industry since 1996. He graduated in Economics, Sociology, and Psychology, and received his doctorate in Economics and the venia legendi in Sociology from the University of Dortmund. His current research focuses on labor conditions, the organization of production, social change and the educational system, the organizational structures of university, Socionics as a new approach to distributed artificial intelligence in cooperation with computer scientists, new public management, and emotions and social structures. Rolf von Lüde is currently Head of Department of Social Sciences and Vice Dean of the School of Business, Economics and Social Sciences, University of Hamburg.     

An interview with Laurens de Haan

Laurens de Haan was born January 15, 1937 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He graduated 1966 in mathematics and received a doctoral degree in 1970 from the University of Amsterdam, while working at the Mathematical center CWI in Amsterdam. Since 1973 he was Professor for probability and mathematical statistics at the Econometric Institute of the Economic Faculty at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, where he retired 1998. Since 2008 he is part-time professor at the Department of Econometrics and Operations Research of Tilburg University. Laurens de Haan has been active in research throughout his career. He has published more than 110 scientific papers. Among other distinctions, he was elected IMS fellow for his seminal contributions to extreme value theory in 1977, and he was appointed Honorary Doctor of the University of Lisbon in 2000.     

Richard Rado

Richard Rado was born in Berlin; he was the second son of LeopoldRado, from Budapest. At one stage of his education he had todecide whether to become a concert pianist or a mathematician.He chose the latter in the belief that he could continue withmusic as a hobby, but that he could never treat mathematicsin that way. He studied at the University of Berlin, but alsospent some time in Göttingen. He took a DPh at Berlin withhis thesis ‘Studien zur Kombinatorik’ [3] underIssai Schur in 1933. During this period he was also influencedby Erhard Schmidt. On 16 March 1933, he married Luise Zadek, the elder daughterof Hermann Zadek, whom he had earlier come to know when he neededa partner to play piano duets. It was indeed a remarkable partnership. As Hitler came to power in 1933, the Rados, being Jewish, madetheir way to England, Richard having obtained a scholarshipof £300 p.a. from Sir Robert Mond through the recommendationof Professor Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell), who had interviewedhim in Berlin, to enable him to study at Cambridge.     

Kunihiko Kodaira

Kunihiko Kodaira, who died on 26 July 1997, was the outstandingJapanese mathematician of the post-war period, his fame establishedby the award of the Fields Medal at the Amsterdam Congress in1954. He was born on 16 March 1915, the son of an agricultural scientistwho at one time was Vice Minister of Agriculture in the JapaneseGovernment and had also played an active role in agriculturaldevelopments in South America. Kodaira studied at Tokyo University,taking degrees in both mathematics and physics. From 1944 to1951 he was an associate professor of physics at the University.His PhD thesis was published in the Annals of Mathematics [18],and it immediately attracted international attention. Essentiallythis filled a significant lacuna in the basic theorem of W.V. D. Hodge on harmonic integrals. Kodaira had worked on thisfor many years but, because of the war, his research was carriedout in isolation from the international community and did notbecome known until much later. Hermann Weyl, who had been a keen supporter of Hodge's work,realised the importance of Kodaira's thesis, and arranged forhim to come to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princetonin 1949. This was the start of Kodaira's 18-year residence inthe United States, a fruitful period which saw the full blossomingof his research, much of it in collaboration with Donald Spencer.Kodaira spent many years at Princeton, divided between the Instituteand the University, but the years 1961–67 were more unsettled,seeing him successively at Harvard, Johns Hopkins and finallyStanford. In 1967 he returned to a professorship at the Universityof Tokyo, where he remained until the normal retiring age. From1975 to 1985 he worked at Gakushuin University, where retirementrestrictions did not apply.     

Scan Statistics on Enron Graphs

We introduce a theory of scan statistics on graphs and apply the ideas to the problem of anomaly detection in a time series of Enron email graphs. Previous presentation: Workshop on Link Analysis, Counterterrorism and Security at the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, Newport Beach, CA, April 23, 2005. Carey E. Priebe received the B.S. degree in mathematics from Purdue University in 1984, the M.S. degree in computer science from San Diego State University in 1988, and the Ph.D. degree in information technology (computational statistics) from George Mason University in 1993. From 1985 to 1994 he worked as a mathematician and scientist in the US Navy research and development laboratory system. Since 1994 he has been a professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland. At Johns Hopkins, he holds joint appointments in the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Imaging Science. He is a past President of the Interface Foundation of North America—Computing Science & Statistics, a past Chair of the Section on Statistical Computing of the American Statistical Association, and on the editorial boards of Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, and Computational Statistics. His research interests are in computational statistics, kernel and mixture estimates, statistical pattern recognition, statistical image analysis, and statistical inference for high-dimensional and graph data. He was elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2002. John M. Conroy received a B.S. in Mathematics from Saint Joseph's University in 1980 and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Maryland in 1986. Since then he has been a research staff member for the IDA Center for Computing Sciences in Bowie, MD. His research interest is applications of numerical linear algebra. He is a member of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Association for Computational Linguistics. David J. Marchette received a B.A. in 1980, and an M.A. in mathematics in 1982, from the University of California at San Diego. He received a Ph.D. in Computational Sciences and Informatics in 1996 from George Mason University under the direction of Ed Wegman. From 1985–1994 he worked at the Naval Ocean Systems Center in San Diego doing research on pattern recognition and computational statistics. In 1994 he moved to the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren Virginia where he does research in computational statistics and pattern recognition, primarily applied to image processing, text processing, automatic target recognition and computer security. Dr. Marchette is a Fellow of the American Statistical Society. Youngser Park received the B.E. degree in electrical engineering from Inha University in Korea in 1985, the M.S. degree in computer science from The George Washington University in 1991, and had pursued a doctoral degree there. From 1998 to 2000 he worked at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutes as a senior research engineer. Since 2003 he is working as a research analyst in the Center for Imaging Science at the Johns Hopkins University. His research interests are clustering algorithm, pattern classification, and data mining.     

Mapping deontic operators to abductive expectations

Deontic concepts and operators have been widely used in several fields where representation of norms is needed, including legal reasoning and normative multi-agent systems. The EU-funded SOCS project has provided a language to specify the agent interaction in open multi-agent systems. The language is equipped with a declarative semantics based on abductive logic programming, and an operational semantics consisting of a (sound and complete) abductive proof procedure. In the SOCS framework, the specification is used directly as a program for the verification procedure. In this paper, we propose a mapping of the usual deontic operators (obligations, prohibition, permission) to language entities, called expectations, available in the SOCS social framework. Although expectations and deontic operators can be quite different from a philosophical viewpoint, we support our mapping by showing a similarity between the abductive semantics for expectations and the Kripke semantics that can be given to deontic operators. The main purpose of this work is to make the computational machinery from the SOCS social framework available for the specification and verification of systems by means of deontic operators. Marco Alberti received his laurea degree in Electronic Engineering in 2001 and his Ph.D. in Information Engineering in 2005 from the University of Ferrara, Italy. His research interests include constraint logic programming and abductive logic programming, applied in particular to the specification and verification of multi-agent systems. He has been involved as a research assistants in national and European research projects. He currently has a post-doc position in the Department of Engineering at the University of Ferrara. Marco Gavanelli is currently assistant professor in the Department of Engineering at the University of Ferrara, Italy. He graduated in Computer Science Engineering in 1998 at the University of Bologna, Italy. He got his Ph.D. in 2002 at Ferrara University. His research interest include Artificial Intelligence, Constraint Logic Programming, Multi-criteria Optimisation, Abductive Logic Programming, Multi-Agent Systems. He is a member of ALP (the Association for Logic Programming) and AI*IA (the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence). He has organised workshops, and is author of more than 30 publications between journals and conference proceedings. Evelina Lamma received her degree in Electronic Engineering from University of Bologna, Italy, in 1985 and her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1990. Currently she is Full Professor at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Ferrara where she teaches Artificial Intelligence and Foundations of Computer Science. Her research activity focuses around: – programming languages (logic languages, modular and object-oriented programming); – artificial intelligence; – knowledge representation; – intelligent agents and multi-agent systems; – machine learning. Her research has covered implementation, application and theoretical aspects. She took part to several national and international research projects. She was responsible of the research group at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria of the University of Ferrara in the UE ITS-2001-32530 Project (named SOCS), in the the context of the UE V Framework Programme - Global Computing Action. Paola Mello received her degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Bologna, Italy, in 1982, and her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1989. Since 1994 she has been Full Professor. She is enrolled, at present, at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Bologna (Italy), where she teaches Artificial Intelligence. Her research activity focuses on programming languages, with particular reference to logic languages and their extensions, artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, expert systems with particular emphasis on medical applications, and multi-agent systems. Her research has covered implementation, application and theoretical aspects and is presented in several national and international publications. She took part to several national and international research projects in the context of computational logic. Giovanni Sartor is Marie-Curie professor of Legal informatics and Legal Theory at the European University Institute of Florence and professor of Computer and Law at the University of Bologna (on leave), after obtaining a PhD at the European University Institute (Florence), working at the Court of Justice of the European Union (Luxembourg), being a researcher at the Italian National Council of Research (ITTIG, Florence), and holding the chair in Jurisprudence at Queen’s University of Belfast (where he now is honorary professor). He is co-editor of the Artificial Intelligence and Law Journal and has published widely in legal philosophy, computational logic, legislation technique, and computer law. Paolo Torroni is Assistant Professor in computing at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Bologna, Italy. He obtained a PhD in Computer Science and Electronic Engineering in 2002, with a dissertation on logic-based agent reasoning and interaction. His research interests mainly focus on computational logic and multi-agent systems research, including logic programming, abductive and hypothetical reasoning, agent interaction, dialogue, negotiation, and argumentation. He is in the steering committee of the CLIMA and DALT international workshops and of the Italian logic programming interest group GULP.     

Nathan Jacobson (1910-1999)

Nathan Jacobson, who died on 5 December 1999, was an outstandingalgebraist, whose work on almost all aspects of algebra wasof fundamental importance, and whose writings will exercisea lasting influence. He had been an honorary member of the Societysince 1972. Nathan Jacobson (later known as ‘Jake’ to his friends)was born in Warsaw (in what he describes as the ‘Jewishghetto’) on 5 October 1910 (through an error some documentshave the date 8 September); he was the second son of CharlesJacobson (as he would be known later) and his wife Pauline,née Rosenberg. His family emigrated to the USA duringthe First World War, first to Nashville, Tennessee, where hisfather owned a small grocery store, but they then settled inBirmingham, Alabama, where Nathan received most of his schooling.Later the family moved to Columbus, Mississippi, but the youngNathan entered the University of Alabama in 1926 and graduatedin 1930. His initial aim was to follow an uncle and obtain adegree in law, but at the same time he took all the (not verynumerous) mathematics courses, in which he did so well thathe was offered a teaching assistantship in mathematics in hisjunior (3rd) year. This marked a turning point; he now decidedto major in mathematics and pursue this study beyond College.During his final year at Alabama he applied for admission andfinancial aid to three top graduate schools in the country:Princeton, Harvard and Chicago. He was awarded a research assistantshipat Princeton; after the first year he was appointed a part-timeinstructor for two years, and during his fourth year he wasappointed a Procter Fellow. The stipend was enough to enablehim to make a grand tour of Europe by car in 1935, in the companyof two Princeton fellow-students at the time: H. F. Bohnenblustand Robert J. Walker.     

A convergence theorem of Rosen’s gradient projection method

Since Rosen’s gradient projection method was published in 1960, a rigorous convergence proof of his method has remained an open question. A convergence theorem is given in this paper. Part of this author’s work was done while he studied at the Department of Mathematics, University of California at Santa Barbara, and was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. MCS83-14977. Part of this author’s work was done while he visited the Computer Science Department, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. MCS81-01214.     

Initial segments of the degrees of size ℵ1

We settle a series of questions first raised by Yates at the Jerusalem (1968) Colloquium on Mathematical Logic by characterizing the initial segments of the degrees of unsolvability of size ℵ₁: Every upper semi-lattice of size ℵ₁ with zero, in which every element has at most countably many predecessors, is isomorphic to an initial segment of the Turing degrees. The second author was partially supported by a grant from the NSF. The research was carried out while he was on sabbatical leave from Cornell University and a Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University, Jersalem. He would like to thank the Hebrew University and in particular the logicians there for their hospitality.     

Emil J. Gumbel’s last course on the “Statistical theory of extreme values”: a conversation with Tuncel M. Yegulalp

GUMBEL. Eponym in mathematical statistics for the first type extreme value distribution and the copula that is both of extreme value and Archimedean kind. Hydrologists appreciate Emil J. Gumbel as a pioneer in promoting non-normal distributions in their field. Historians rank him among the most influential German intellectuals of the Weimar Republic. He disclosed secret societies that destabilized the Weimar Republic and used statistical methods to document political murders and to reveal a biased legal system. He was the first professor who lost his position for his political ideals and his stand against the national socialistic party, his books were banned and burned. Stripped of his nationality in 1933 he immigrated to France. In 1940 he escaped to the USA and settled in New York, where he was appointed Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Department of Industrial Engineering, in 1953. We spoke with Tuncel M. Yegulalp –Professor emeritus of Mining Engineering at Columbia University– about Emil J. Gumbel’s last course on the “Statistical Theory of Extreme Values” back in 1964.     

Self-regulation through social institutions: A framework for the design of open agent-based electronic marketplaces

In this paper, we argue that allowing self-interested agents to activate social institutions during runtime can improve the robustness (i.e., stability, reliability, or scalability) of open multiagent systems (MAS). Referring to sociological theory, we consider institutions to be rules that need to be activated and adopted by the agent population during runtime and propose a framework for self-regulation of MAS for the domain of electronic marketplaces. The framework consists of three different institutional types that are defined by the mechanisms and instances that generate, change or safeguard them. We suggest that allowing autonomous agents both the reasoning about their compliance with a rule and the selection of an adequate institutional types helps to balance the trade-off between the autonomy of self-interested agents and the maintenance of social order (cf. Castelfranchi, 2000) in MAS, and to ensure almost the same qualities as in closed environments. A preliminary report of the evaluation of the prototype by empirical simulations is given. Christian S. Hahn studied computer science and economics at Saarland University and received his diploma in 2004. Currently, he works in a project of the priority program ‘Socionics’ funded by the German Research Foundation at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). Bettina Fley studied sociology, economics, law, and social and economic history at the University of Hamburg and received her diploma in 2002. She currently works in a project in the priority program ‘Socionics’, which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), at the Department of Technology Assessment at the Hamburg University of Technology. Michael Florian, received his master in sociology at the University of Münster, where he also finished his doctoral degree in 1993. Since 1995, he holds a position as a senior researcher (‘Oberingenieur’) at the Department of Technology Assessment at the Hamburg University of Technology and heads the sociological part of a project in the priority program ‘Socionics’ funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).     

An application of coding theory to a problem in graphical enumeration

This note was written while the first author was visiting the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization of the University of Waterloo as an Adjunct Professor. He would like to thank his colleagues there for their hospitality. The second author acknowledges the support of the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada given under grant #0GP0009258.     

On roulette which allows stakes on infinitely many holes

It is shown that if a gambleγ stakes positive amounts on infinitely many holes of a subfair roulette-table, then for everyɛ>0, there is a gambleγ * with positive stakes on only a finite number of holes, such thatγQ≦γ*Q+ε for every nondecreasing functionQ bounded above by 1 on [0, ∞]. It is deduced from this proposition that a gambler who wishes to maximize his chances to increase his current fortune by a specified amount, has no advantage in ever placing positive stakes on more than a finite number of holes on any single spin. This result settles a question left open in [1]. This author was on leave from Tel Aviv University when this note was prepared. He wishes to acknowledge the hospitality of the School of Statistics at the University of Minnesota. This author is thankful to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for its financial support.     

Speech acts, commitment and multi-agent communication

The principle aim of this paper is to reconsider the suitability of Austin and Searle’s Speech Act theory as a basis for agent communication languages. Two distinct computational interpretations of speech acts are considered: the standard “mentalistic” approach associated with the work of Cohen and Levesque which involves attributing beliefs and intentions to artificial agents, and the “social semantics” approach originating (in the context of MAS) with Singh which aims to model commitments that agents undertake as a consequence of communicative actions. Modifications and extensions are proposed to current commitment-based analyses, drawing on recent philosophical studies by Brandom, Habermas and Heath. A case is made for adopting Brandom’s framework of normative pragmatics, modelling dialogue states as deontic scoreboards which keep track of commitments and entitlements that speakers acknowledge and hearers attribute to other interlocutors. The paper concludes by outlining an update semantics and protocol for selected locutions. Rodger Kibble is a Lecturer in the Department of Computing, Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has worked as a researcher at the Information Technology Research Institute, University of Brighton, and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He received his PhD from the Centre for Cognitive Science in the University of Edinburgh in 1997. He has published conference papers and journal articles in the formal semantics of natural language, natural language generation, anaphora resolution, dialogue modelling, argumentation and multi-agent communication; and coedited Information Sharing: Reference and Presupposition in Language Generation and Interpretation (CSLI, 2002).     

An agent-based investigation into the new product development capability

The capability to bring products to market which comply with quality, cost and development time goals is vital to the survival of firms in a competitve environment. New product development comprises knowledge creation and search and can be organized in different ways. In this paper, we study the performance of several alternative organizational models for new product development using a model of distributed, self-adapting (learning) agents. The agents (a marketing and a production agent) are modelled via neural networks. The artificial new product development process analyzed starts with learning on the basis of an initial set of production and marketing data about possible products and their evaluation. Subsequently, in each step of the process, the agents search for a better product with their current models of the environment and, then, refine their representations based on additional prototypes generated (new learning data). Within this framework, we investigate the influence of different types of new product search methods and generating prototypes/learning according to the performance of individual agents and the organization as a whole. In particular, sequential, team-based Trial & Error and House of Quality guided search are combined with prototype sampling methods of different intensity and breadth; also, the complexity of the agents (number of hidden units) is varied. It turns out that both the knowledge base and the search procedure have a significant impact on the agents' generalization ability and success in new product development. Andreas Mild was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1973. He studied business administration in Vienna, in 2000 he received his Ph.D. from the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration (WU). Since 2003 he is associated professor at the WU. He has been guest professor in Frankfurt, Germany, Sydney, Australia and Bangkok, Thailand. Previous research appeared in Journals such as MIS Quarterly, Management Science and Marketing Science. His research interests currently include agent-based models, new product development and recommender systems. Alfred Taudes was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1959. He studied business administration and management information systems (MIS) in Vienna (doctorate 1984), in 1991 he received his Ph.D. from the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration (WU). He was assistant professor at the WU (1986–1991) and professor for MIS at the German Universities of Augsburg (1991), Münster (1991/92) and Essen (1992/93). Since 1993, he has been professor for MIS at the WU and Head of the Department for Production Management. Since 2000, Dr. Taudes has been speaker for the Special Research Area SFB # 010 (Adaptive Information Systems and Modelling in Economics and Management Science). His research interests currently include agent-based models of industry structures, management of innovation, technology management and business strategy.     

Deformed virasoro algebras andw-algebras from elliptic algebras

Deformedw _n -algebras in the classical case (i.e., Poisson structures) and in the quantum case (exchange algebras) are constructed from the elliptic algebras . In memory of M. Saveliev When I think about Misha, and this has been happening rather frequently these recent months, it is his enthusiasm and his communicative energy that first come to mind. Something very important to Misha was friendship. We scientists have the priviledge to possess friends, real friends, among our colleagues, and Misha was a friend. Something else was fundamental for Misha, his family, i.e., his parents, his wife, and his daughter. As Professor Manin said, summarizing Misha’s behavior very simply and elegantly, Misha was “a good son, a good husband, a good father.” Misha’s parents died about three years ago, and I remember how he was sad when I met him in Georgia in September 1996 and he informed me about his father’s and mother’s deaths a few months before. After that, he concentrated all his forces to protect his wife and daughter, the two Svetlanas, as he used to say! He was so proud of his gifted daughter, a good musician, a good painter, and a brilliant student. I wish to present them my most respectful thoughts. Misha was a great expert in integrable systems. He was deeply interested in developing models, which he did so nicely in the framework of Toda theories. I learned much from him about Toda theories and also continuous Lie algebras. Misha was highly convinced of the importance of symmetries and was especially interested in the use of infinite symmetries, the W-algebras among them. The landscape of continuous symmetries, and particularly of infinite-dimensional symmetries, is becoming richer and richer these years. I dare to think that Misha would have been interested in the modest seminar I now present. Translated from Teoreticheskaya i Matematicheskaya Fizika, Vol. 123, No. 2, pp. 311–322, May, 2000.