Title: 70th birthday of Reinhard Folk

On April 29, 2015 Reinhard Folk - member of the Editorial Board of "Condensed Matter Physics", renowned expert in the fields of condensed matter physics, phase transitions and critical phenomena - celebrated his 70th birthday. Reinhard Folk was born in Neuendettelsau, Germany. He studied at the University of Vienna, where in 1973 he defended his doctoral thesis "Hydrodynamic Equations of Dielectric Crystals" (under supervision of Franz Schwabl). In the same year he started working at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Johannes Kepler University in Linz, at first as assistant, later as an associate professor, then as extraordinary professor, and finally as Director of the research group "Phase Transitions and Critical Phenomena". His research interests cover various fields of condensed matter physics. In particular, he obtained important results in the theory of ferroelectrics, quantum liquids, critical phenomena in magnets and random systems, spin liquids, superconductors, and neural networks. Reinhard Folk and his collaborators performed a series of studies that became the basis for understanding and quantitative description of phenomena occurring in many systems. Included amongst these are the description of the thermodynamic properties of matter in the vicinity of Lifshitz points, the description of critical dynamics in systems with different types of conservation laws, the analysis of effective (non-asymptotic) critical behaviour, and generalized hydrodynamics of many-particle systems. Computing algorithms, resummation methods of asymptotic perturbation series proposed by Reinhard Folk and his collaborators, cover a wide range of applications. In 1982 (together with Volker Dohm) he was awarded the Walter Schottky Prize of the German Physical Society for his studies of the critical dynamics of helium-4 . Those of us who were fortunate to know Reinhard Folk closer, are aware of his interests in the history of culture and the history of natural sciences in particular. Recently, these interests have also led to significant professional work in these fields.

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