In the summer of 1957 at Cornell University the first of a cavalcade of large-scale meetings partially or completely devoted to logic took place—the five-week long Summer Institute for Symbolic Logic. That meeting turned out to be a watershed event in the development of logic: it was unique in bringing together for such an extended period researchers at every level in all parts of the subject, and the synergetic connections established there would thenceforth change the face of mathematical logic both qualitatively and quantitatively.