Although [Raissa] joined her husband and lived in New York permanently thereafter, federal officials did not proceed against her until 1939. For the next sixteen years the Browders waged a legal battle to prevent her deportation.

... he provided for his second family "an urban home of [culturally] superior circumstances." His relationship with his three sons was "very close." Ironically, the children were always fond of the sciences. Although they experienced some discrimination because of their father's beliefs, they all became mathematics professors at major American universities.

I progressed through architect (based on Lincoln Logs and Tinkertoys), mechanical engineer (Erector sets), chemist, and finally physicist, after the excitement of the atomic bomb. It was in the pages of the 'New York Times' in August 1945 that I first read the description of the atom and nuclear fission and learned the atomic number and weight of the isotopes of uranium. I had read some wild science fiction before that, but this was a wilder reality.

Some of the students had something called "physical intuition," which enabled them to give strange and wonderful answers to questions, which were greeted by the professor with delight but made no sense to me at all. At the same time the professor was making a computational hash of some mathematics that was explained in a very beautiful and motivated way in a mathematics course I was taking.

I went off to Rochester with only one small result towards a thesis, to a department where I would have no one in my field to talk to. This in retrospect was a blessing of great proportions. After six months of depression and buoyed by the possibility of a much more interesting job at Cornell, I decided to simply sit down and try and write the simplest things I could deduce about the problem. Suddenly I saw a whole new aspect of the situation and, with energy and enthusiasm, slashed away at a thesis.

This procedure has wide-ranging, deep applications in every area of the topology of smooth manifolds, including transformation groups, classification of manifolds, and imbedding and immersion theory. Analogous techniques and applications hold for PL and topological manifolds.

... book gives a comprehensive introduction to the theory of 1-connected surgery as well as some of the most important applications. It has a number of features that make it especially useful for anyone wishing to learn surgery theory. First, the author takes special pains with the basic algebraic topology and algebra involved in 1-connected surgery ... . Secondly, the book collects a great deal of diverse background information from the literature, giving relatively complete expositions ... . Finally, and perhaps most important, is the way in which the author has organized the theory. After a chapter on preliminaries, he lists seven basic results of surgery theory and then proceeds to derive many important applications of the theory from these. The remainder of the book is devoted to a proof of the seven basic results. This procedure allows the student to arrive at interesting applications before becoming engulfed in the many technical details of the main proofs. It also focuses attention properly on the most significant tools provided by the theory for the study of 1-connected manifolds.

I was offered the chairmanship of [the University of Rochester Mathematics Department] in 1986, and I had many interesting and impressive conversations about it with many people at Rochester. Though I decided in the end not to leave Princeton, I found the attitudes of the Rochester administration and the Mathematics Department very laudable, and I tried to use my influence in the mathematical community to help in the building effort. I expended considerable effort in influencing people toward going there ...

The AMS membership was not unanimously against military funding for mathematics. Many thought the Society had no business telling mathematicians who they should and should not take funding from. I remember a heated Council debate in which William Browder, then AMS president, expressed his strong opposition to blanket condemnations of research grants from the military. He likened such condemnations to a "witch hunt" against those who opted to take such grants. (Browder, whose father Earl was persecuted because of his leadership of the American Communist Party, is not one to use the term "witch hunt" lightly.)

... combined short remarks about his presidency with a mathematical lecture - preceded by an informal interview in which he discussed a range of topics, including public awareness of mathematics and his interest in music. The lecture discussed the action of finite groups on manifolds, exploring the question of how large a finite group can effectively act on a given manifold (here, "effectively" means that there is no subgroup that fixes everything). A related question is, what kind of spaces have the given manifold as a covering space? Beginning with the historical roots of these questions, Browder concentrated on familiar examples such as the sphere, the $n$-sphere, or a product of spheres of different dimensions.

I would look for candidates who, while having a strong research orientation, have the political skills to contribute to both the smooth running of the organization and to the ongoing efforts to communicate the importance of mathematics to policymakers and to the general public. The building of such a group of people is important to the long-term health of our subject. They should be representative of the diverse interests of the membership, both in mathematical questions and in political and social viewpoints relevant to our community.