Stanford University professor emeritus, was born in Amsterdam, received his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1946. Beginning with his first paper on the condensation of gases (published in 1944), he made important contributions in statistical mechanics, superconductivity, quantum field theory, and elementary particle physics. A historian of modern science, he researched, lectured and wrote about great scientists of the 1920s and 1930s. While a member of the faculty at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1964-1989, Dresden helped to found and served as executive director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics. After retiring from Stony Brook, he moved to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center where he continued research, teaching, and lecturing. Max Dresden died in 1997.