This book shows how the study of multi-hadron production phenomena in the years after the
founding of CERN culminated in Hagedorn's pioneering idea of limiting temperature leading on
to the discovery of the quark-gluon plasma -- announced in February 2000 at CERN. Following
the foreword by Herwig Schopper -- the Director General (1981-1988) of CERN at the key
historical juncture -- the first part is a tribute to Rolf Hagedorn (1919-2003) and includes
contributions by contemporary friends and colleagues and those who were most touched by
Hagedorn: Tamás Biró Igor Dremin Torleif Ericson Marek Gazdzicki Mark Gorenstein Hans
Gutbrod Maurice Jacob István Montvay Berndt Müller Grazyna Odyniec Emanuele Quercigh
Krzysztof Redlich Helmut Satz Luigi Sertorio Ludwik Turko and Gabriele Veneziano. The
second and third parts retrace 20 years of developments that after discovery of the Hagedorn
temperature in 1964 led to its recognition as the melting point of hadrons into boiling quarks
and to the rise of the experimental relativistic heavy ion collision program. These parts
contain previously unpublished material authored by Hagedorn and Rafelski: conference
retrospectives research notes workshop reports in some instances abbreviated to avoid
duplication of material and rounded off with the editor's explanatory notes. About the editor:
Johann Rafelski is a theoretical physicist working at The University of Arizona in Tucson USA.
Born in 1950 in Krakow Poland he received his Ph.D. with Walter Greiner in Frankfurt Germany
in 1973. Rafelski arrived at CERN in 1977 where in a joint effort with Hagedorn he contributed
greatly to the establishment of the relativistic heavy ion collision and quark-gluon plasma
research fields. Moving on with stops in Frankfurt and Cape Town to Arizona he invented and
developed the strangeness quark flavor as the signature of quark-gluon plasma.
