Norman and Bernie Zeigler at AIS'2000 Banquet

Bernie Zeigler celebrated his 60th birthday at the AIS'2000 conference in Tucson, Arizona. At the conference he recived a special award from the Simulation Society. I was his second doctoral student when he was a fresh assistant prof in Michigan. Already, he had very profound ideas about systems theory. I absorbed as much as I could from him, then set out on my path. In the years since, our intellectual paths have re-crossed many times. My paper with Bernie ("Emergence and Computation", in the IJGS) is regarded by a founder of AI, Prof Donald Michie, as one of the most insightful ones in systems science. It was not part of my doctoral work, but was the result of discussions I had with Bernie many years later when I visited Ann Arbor.