Issues

The article below is based on a talk given by the author at the NATO (AGARD) Symposium on Materials Science which was held last May in Paris. Professor Seitz is head of the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois and is currently serving as president of the American Physical Society.

Summer Institutes are no longer rare, as their value in providing intensive training in today's rapidly developing fields of physics and chemistry has been well established. The announcement of the first such winter institute in the fall of 1960 was received with considerable interest and anticipation, particularly from those scientists either familiar with or aware of the three successful Summer Institutes previously given by Professor P. O. Löwdin and his Quantum Chemistry Group at the University of Uppsala (Sweden). The following is a report on the Winter Institute in Quantum Chemistry and Solid‐State Physics, arranged by the new Quantum Theory Project of the University of Florida in collaboration with the University of Uppsala and supported by the National Science Foundation. The Institute consisted of two parts: an introductory course, held at the campus of the University of Florida during the last three weeks of December, 1960, and an advanced course given at Sanibel Island in the Gulf of Mexico during the first two weeks of January, 1961. The introductory course is described by Luigi Z. Pollara, head of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology; the report on the advanced course was written by Arthur J. Freeman, a solid‐state physicist at the Materials Research Laboratory, Ordnance Materials Research Office, Watertown, Mass.

The following is the text of an invited address presented at the banquet of a conference on superconductivity which was organized by IBM and held last June at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, IBM's new computer laboratory in Yorktown, N.Y.