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This preface to A Festschrift for Maurice Goldhaber presents the Editors with the agreeable opportunity to provide a brief review of the scientific career of Maurice Goldhaber. His career has been exceedingly wide and fruitful- as measured either by the areas of his research, by the people he has influenced, or by the institutions with which he has been associated. One way to see this is from the variety of topics covered by the contributions to this Festschrift, all from people who have been Maurice\'s colleagues or students. Therefore, this introduction makes no effort to cover all of the things he has worked on, or the details of his activities. Instead, we focus on a few of the major themes of his work. Further details can be found in the list of publications that is appended, in some of the individual contributions to the Festschrift, and in the drawing by Gerson Goldhaber.
Maurice Goldhaber was born in Lemberg, Austria on April 18, 1911. He received his early education in a number of places, including the University of Berlin. He went on to Cambridge University after his early education was interrupted. Very soon after coming to Cambridge, he got involved in the exciting work on neutrons going on at the Cavendish, at that time still headed by Rutherford. An early paper he wrote with J.
Chadwick first demonstrated that free neutrons were heavier than protons, which showed simultaneously that neutrons are not bound-states of protons with electrons and that neutrons could be expected to undergo radioactive decay. The method of measuring the neutron was characteristically ingenious involving the use of the hitherto unknown process of deuteron photodisintegration by y-rays to measure the deuteron binding energy. Photonuclear reactions, both emission and absorptionj, have remained an interest of Goldhaber, and many of his later papers return to these topics.
He obtained his Ph.D. degree at Cambridge in 1936.
In 1938, Goldhaber came to the United States and became a professor of physics
