dour events go in academia, a remarkable occasion. Virtually all of his old students and many of his former colleagues and collaborators from all over the country, and indeed the world, flooded the auditorium. The eulogies were lavish and well deserved, for Leon Festinger was one of the most important psychologists of our time.

Festinger was born in Brooklyn, New York, on May 8, 1919, to Alex Festinger, an embroidery manufacturer, and Sara Solomon Festinger. He went to Boys' High School, City College, and, for graduate study, to the University of Iowa, where he worked with Kurt Lewin, a Gestalt and Field theorist who had fled the Nazis to arrive in an America where the psychological establishment, though hardly a dictatorship, was ruled by an even more dogmatic group, also convinced that it had the Truth, called Behaviorists.

Lewin and his students probably did more than any other group of scientists to mold psychology into an enterprise concerned with more than stimulus-response connections but with dynamic processes involving perception, motivation, and cognition. They did so quietly and without doing battle but largely by example—repeatedly demonstrating that it was possible to work with experimental and theoretical precision on problems of consuming human interest such as decision making, ambition, tension, level of aspiration, and the like.

Festinger honed his talents in his first work with Lewin. As an undergraduate working with Max Hertzman (Hertzman and Festinger, 1940), he had already demonstrated considerable skill working with Lewinian ideas. At Iowa, though Lewin's interests had shifted to social psychology or, as he called it, "group dynamics," Festinger, uninterested then in social psychology, continued to work on older Lewinian problems. He also turned his considerable mathematical talents to statistics and developed several of the earliest nonparametric tests (Festinger, 1946). On completing his degree,