The Danckwerts Memorial Lecture provides an opportunity to look at the past and project into the future. It is honor to be invited to attempt to do this. The key issue is: In what possible ways may I provide some illuminating viewpoint?
It would be foolish to attempt to place P. V. Dankwerts’s (PVD’s) oeuvre in perspective. This was done by Neal Amundson, the first Danckwerts’s Lecturer, in 1986 (Amundson, 1986), by PVD himself in his `Insights into Chemical Engineeringa (Danckwerts, 1981), and by Rutherford Aris in 1990 in both, a pithy review of PVD’s Insights as well as in his own Danckwerts Memorial Lecture in 1991.