This volume is dedicated to John Benedetto. It seems just yesterday that we celebrated his 60th birthday in a memorable conference in College Park. Yet that was October of 1999, and already more than six years have passed. But John is still too young to be fully honored by a single foreword,or even a singlevolume,thatattemptstosummarizetheimpactofhisworkonharmonic analysis, his students, and his coworkers.Given his continuing high (and even increasing) level of activities, his list of “lifetime achievements” is surely far from complete. Even so, we will make an attempt in this foreword to take a look back, to see the major lines of his work and activities during the past 40 years of his life as a scientist, and to learn from his biography (and bibliography) how the ?eld of harmonic analysis has changed over the years, and in particular to see the vibrant role that John has taken in this process. John’s ?rst paper appeared in 1965, when he was 25 years old, and his ?rst book (the Springer Lecture Notes on Harmonic Analysis on Totally D- connected Sets) when he was 31. By that time he had already published on the subjects of Tauberian algebras, in the theory of generalized functions, and on questions related to spectral synthesis. His work on this latter topic continued through the 1970s, culminating in the insightful volume Spectral Synthesis (1975). Only a year later, his text Real Variables and Integration with Historical Notes appeared.
