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LBL has been the cradle where relativistic heavy ion physics began, and where the Hagedorn Statistical Model was first connected to relativistic heavy ion physics. The early program of research at the Bevalac and its development into an international program at CERN, paying tribute to the seminal effort by Howel Pugh, is described.

I describe several events that characterize my work with and my personal relationship with Rolf Hagedorn himself, closing with biographical remarks.

On the occasion of Rolf Hagedorn’s 75th birthday it gives me a special honor and pleasure to have this opportunity to add these remarks about the seminal influence Hagedorn has had on the scientific community.

I present here Rolf Hagedorn as a man, and present his achievements as a physicist. He has made several very important contributions: to particle and nuclear fields of research: The Hagedorn Temperature and the Statistical Bootstrap Model are concepts that are here to stay, and which have stimulated much further research. But Rolf Hagedorn is also a wonderful person and, saying that, does not require a specialist.

Theoretical physics is not based on dogmatic truths. It is the search for ever improving formal constructions that can agree with the new experimental discoveries. At each step new unknowns appear, new domains are opened. This is the immense fascination of fundamental research.

Rolf Hagedorn is introduced from the personal perspective of two Hungarian physics generations. A colleague (IM) and a student (TB) recount memories and events from the early-70-s to mid-80-s, and evaluate Hagedorn’s impact on present particle and nuclear Hungarian physics community.

We recall the context and impact of Rolf Hagedorn’s discovery of limiting temperature, in effect a melting point of hadrons, and its influence on the physics of strong interactions.

In the latter half of the last century, it became evident that there exists an ever increasing number of different states of the so-called elementary particles. The usual reductionist approach to this problem was to search for a simpler infrastructure, culminating in the formulation of the quark model and quantum chromodynamics. In a complementary, completely novel approach, Hagedorn suggested that the mass distribution of the produced particles follows a self-similar composition pattern, predicting an unbounded number of states of increasing mass. He then concluded that such a growth would lead to a limiting temperature for strongly interacting matter. We discuss the conceptual basis for this approach, its relation to critical behavior, and its subsequent applications in different areas of high energy physics.

In this contribution I recall how people working in the late 1960s on the dual resonance model came to the surprising discovery of a Hagedorn-like spectrum, and why they should have been surprised. I will then turn to discussing the Hagedorn spectrum from a string theory viewpoint (which adds a huge degeneracy to the exponential spectrum). Finally, I will discuss how all this can be reinterpreted in the new incarnation of string theory through the properties of quantum black holes.

I describe studies done by the theory group of Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow and point out the cross-influence of some of our work with that of Rolf Hagedorn, and show how this research continued and evolved up to the present.