Remembrance of "Oxford" conferences past.

Abstract

The seeds of what subsequently flowered into the triennial “Oxford Conferences” on modelling and the control of breathing were sown at the conference dinner of a scientific meeting at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw in 1971 at which Dan Cunningham, a respiratory physiologist at the University of Oxford and Richard Herczynski a mathematician and fluid dynamicist at the Polish Academy of Sciences, happened to be seated beside each other. As recounted by Cunningham in the interview that he gave to the Physiological Society (of the United Kingdom) in 1994 as part of its Oral History project: “My parper at the Warsaw meeting was ahout the pattern of breathing … I was trying to express the thing quantitatively and he drew it all out on a paper table napkin for me … we thought at that time,supposing people like him and people like myself got together and talked this kind of thing out in public at a meeting, it might be to the benefit of both sides”