Stanley Mandelstam

I meet Stanley from time to time at conferences. His brilliant conjecture called the double dispersion relations, or the Mandelstam representation, was the first problem posed to me by my supervisor, Abdus Salam. But it was too hard for me. Later, I was also tempted to follow his work on gauge theory without potentials, but I did not get any ideas. Our paths crossed (and maybe our swords too) again when, in 1975, he came up with a formula for the bosonisation of a Thirring Fermion in 1+1 dimensions. This overlapped with some work I had done with Ivan Wilde. The formula for the Fermi field can be found in a 1958 paper of Tony Skyrme, and was made rigorous by us. Nevertheless, it is called the "Mandelstam" formula by some people.