A personal retrospective on the second half of the 20th century

During the Second World War scientists and engineers were involved as never before in all technical phases of the war effort. It included intelligence, logistics and large scale automated computation. Much of this required team work which led to the adoption of interdisciplinary perspectives and found expression after the war in new fields of enquiry such as cybernetics, biophysics and artificial intelligence. While Europe was recovering from its devastation, the United States entered an unprecedented age of prosperity beginning in the 1940s and 50s. The political and budgetary environment was favorable for scientific research and it was felt in Europe as well as the U.S.A. I discuss some of these conditions and the figures associated with the work that became the foundation for advances throughout the second half of the 20th century and conclude with a few observations on quantitative neuroscience and the problem of representation.