Frankfurt 2006 – scientific programme

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SYWG: Wolfgang-Gentner Symposium

SYWG 3: Wolfgang-Gentner Symposium II

SYWG 3.1: Invited Talk

Wednesday, March 15, 2006, 11:30–12:00, Aula

Wolfgang Gentner and the German-Israeli Scientific Cooperation — •Itzhak Tserruya — Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

A review is presented which describes the early days of the first contacts, in the late 1950s, between German and Israeli scientists under the leadership and vision of Wolfgang Gentner at the time a director of CERN in Geneva, Amos de Shalit who by then was chairman of the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Weizmann Institute and Gerhard Schmidt a chemist also from the Weizmann Institute. Their humanism, courage, wisdow and deep conviction of the role that scientists can and should play in building a bridge to the future over the abyss of the past led to the first agreement of scientific cooperation between the Weizmann Institute and the Max Planck Society. Over more than forty years that have past since then, this pionering effort has developed into a very successful programme of broad scientific cooperation between Germany and Israel. Most of of the programme is sponsored by the Minerva Foundation founded in 1964 by Wolfgang Gentner. I shall review the impact and the present scope of the programme, that has made Germany the most important european scientific partner of Israel.