The fellow who is able to get the grants and contracts is the fellow who gets the doctoral students. Each student publishes two or three papers on hi… - Robert E. Machol

Every large-scale system is an . The automatic factory, the vehicular-traffic system, any military system- in the design of all these systems, primary attention should be given to the flow of information about the elements of the system.

Most accidents in well-designed systems involve two or more events of low probability occurring in the worst possible combination.

At this time it is difficult to put one's finger on any single contribution in the decade 1950 - 1960 which is comparable to those above, and yet progress has probably been even greater. From the point of view of an educator, one cannot overlook the wide distribution which has been given to these ideas. There has been remarkable progress from analysis to synthesis, always a sign of maturity in a field of analytic endeavour. There has been consolidation, for example in the establishment of a more rigorous basis for information theory; there has been unification, for example in the demonstration of the formal similarity between game theory and ; there has been application to mathematically more difficult situations, for example nonlinear servo systems and information channels with memory; there has been implementation, as in commercially available computers which by any reasonable measure are hun- dreds of times more powerful than the primitive devices of 1950; there has been de-limitation of the boundaries of many of these fields.