Wren, like Nicholas Kurti, had during his early life been forced to flee his home by conflict and the threat of conflict (the English Civil War), and he had also shown precocious aptitude for mathematics and natural philosophy -what we would now call physics. Again like Nicholas, Wren became an FRS (he was a founder member and sometime President) and an Oxford professor, but he was not prepared to devote all his time to university teaching and academic research -he started to design buildings. Architects make a very practical contribution to our comfort: they design the roofs over our heads. Nicholas became interested in an equally practical subject: eating -he started in later life to make contributions to the physics of food and he became a world authority on the subject.Wren's first architectural commission was the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. In the best Royal Society tradition he based the building on a classical model, the Theatre of Marcellus in Rome. But Roman theatres are open to the sky so Wren had to design a self-supporting ceiling with a span of 20 m and for this he developed an ingenious triangulation system -a happy marriage of mathematics and architecture. The ceiling was decorated with paintings by Robert Streeter on the theme of 'Truth descending on the Arts and Sciences'. What more appropriate venue could there possibly have been for a celebration of the life of Nicholas Kurti? Nicholas's family were determined that the occasion would not be a mournful Memorial Service; we were commemorating a long, happy, and creative life and there was much music and anecdote. The tributes were heartfelt but also amusing and the humour was especially appreciated by the capacity assembly in the auditorium. The Sheldonian is after all a theatre, and it was a theatrical occasion, and all the better for that. It has to be admitted that Nicholas was himself a theatrical person, from his early ambitions to be a concert pianist and his appearance in the Guinness Book of Records for creating the coldest place in the universe, to his famously eccentric method of extracting himself from car parks that had closed for the night and his notable lectures on cooking.He was a founder member of the Editorial Board of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews and until his death remained one of the journal's most enthusiastic supporters. In gratitude for this, and by agreement with his family, we are reproducing below the programme of the celebration and transcripts of the addresses of appreciation.Jack Harris
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