Nathan passed away in July after a lengthy illness. I am sure most of you are familiar
with his many contributions to heavy quark physics and it is certainly fitting that we
take a few minutes to honor him at the beginning of this meeting. Actually Nathan's
main physics interest was the strong interactions rather than heavy quark physics per
se. He was already very well known for work he did with Gabriel Karl and others on
the nonrelativistic quark model before the work that he did on heavy quark symmetry
and its applications. However, Nathan understood the limitations of the nonrelativistic
quark model, and was thrilled that the methods he helped develop allowed one to derive
systematically from the theory of the strong interactions many properties of hadrons that
contain a heavy quark
