On June 2, 2007, immediately following the 10th Eastern Gravity Meeting, a one-day celebratory symposium and banquet was held at Cornell University to honor Saul Teukolsky's upcoming 60th birthday. To no one's surprise, the event drew a large crowd of Saul's friends, family, students, and colleagues.
The Symposium's talks covered a range of topics from Saul's broad interests in gravitation and relativistic astrophysics. The morning session of talks included three former post-docs from Saul's group: Dierdre Shoemaker(Penn State), Monica Colpi(Milano), and Sam Finn(Penn State), along with Scott Hughes(MIT) who began his career in physics as a member of Saul's undergraduate scientific visualization team.
Dierdre Shoemaker's talk on ``Binary Black Hole Mergers'' provided an overview covering both the history of numerical simulations of binary black hole collisions and the dramatic advances that have taken place over the last two years in that field. Paying homage to the Teukolsky equation, Scott Hughes give a talk on ``Perturbation Theory and Binary Evolution'', reminding everyone of the importance of the Teukolsky equation and discussing recent work on its application to the extreme-mass-ratio inspiral problem. Monica Colpi gave a fascinating talk on ``Light and Gravitational Waves from Massive Black Hole Binaries'', focusing on astrophysical investigations associated with black-hole binaries. Finally, Sam Finn talked on ``Gravitational Waves and Their Detection'', giving an informative overview of the status of, and future plans for, the current generation of gravitational-wave observatories.
Following a catered lunch, the afternoon session of talks drew on speakers Saul had met as a graduate student at Caltech, during the ``golden age of black-hole physics''. The featured speakers were Kip Thorne(Caltech), Saul's PhD adviser, and two fellow Caltech graduate students, Richard Price(UT Brownsville) and Alan Lightman(MIT).
Leading off the afternoon, Richard Price gave an entertaining talk on ``Radiative Tails and the Teukolsky Equation'', presenting a new perspective on the subtle issue of mode coupling in the Teukolsky equation. Kip Thorne presented a charming talk on ``Saul and the Warped Side of the Universe''. Outlining Saul's journey to become a physicist from his youth in South Africa through his time at Caltech, Kip painted a warm picture of Saul as a brilliant student who struggled with and eventually vanquished the problem of how to handle perturbations of Kerr. The final presentation of the Symposium was given by physicist-turned-novelist Alan Lightman. In a talk titled ``A Sense of the Mysterious'', he presented his unique perspective on how scientists and artists often view the world in very different ways.
The day of talks was capped off by a banquet featuring Bill Press(UT Austin) as the after-dinner speaker. Another of Saul's fellow Caltech graduate students, Press presented a thoroughly entertaining talk and slide show. In pictures secretly provided by an "anonymous source", we got to see how Saul really prefers to dress when carrying out complex calculations at the kitchen table, and we learned of his surprising connection to Zaphod Beeblebrox.
Adding to the after-dinner entertainment, ``Bernie and the Gravitones''
presented ``Don't 
Me, Saul Teukolsky'' sung to the tune of ``Don't
Cry for Me, Argentina''. With Bernie Shutz unfortunately unable to
attend (although he was present in spirit via his picture on an
easel) Cliff Will(Wash. U) bravely led Richard Price, Kip Thorne,
Sandor Kovacs(Wash. U), and Eanna Flanagan(Cornell).
Saul Teukolsky is modest man, but if a person is to be measured by his work and by his friends, then the day's festivities showed Saul has much to be proud of.