Saturday, April 01, 2006

60th birthdays

[Lowerbounds,Upperbounds] advertises MillerFest, a celebration of Gary Miller's 60th birthday. On April 24-25, Rutgers and DIMACS are hosting a workshop in honor of Joel Spencer's 60th birthday. Frieze Fest, last October, commemorated Alan Frieze's 60th birthday. I also hear that Peter Winkler's 60th will be commemorated next year, again at DIMACS.

What started the tradition of 60th birthday celebrations for researchers ? If you google '60th birthday mathematician', you get a very large number of links, as you do if you replace mathematician by physicist or economist. I looked all over attempting to find a source for this tradition, but it appears to go quite far back. I was wondering if any of my readers had any ideas about this...
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1 comment:

  1. Traditional retirement age (esp. in the old days of forced retirement)? 

    Posted by Amit Chakrabarti

    ReplyDelete

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