This memorial volume is dedicated to physicist Gerald E Brown (1926-2013) or 'Gerry' as he was known to his many students, postdocs, colleagues and friends. As written by one of the contributors to this book, 'Gerry was an inspiring father figure for generations of theoretical nuclear physicists and a great human being'.This book covers a wide range of topics in nuclear physics, including nuclear structure, two- and three-body nuclear forces, strangeness nuclear physics, chiral symmetry, hadrons in dense medium, hidden local symmetry, heavy quark symmetry, cosmic neutrinos, nuclear double-beta decay, neutron stars, gravitational waves, renormalization group methods, exotic nuclei, electron ion collider (EIC), and much more. Most of the authors are Gerry's former students and collaborators.We hope readers will find this book very interesting not only for its physics content but also for the window it gives into Gerry's personal legacy and humanity. This book has vivid recollections of Gerry at Stony Brook, Princeton and Copenhagen, together with his humor and his very special intuitive way of thinking.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of some key developments in the understanding of the nucleon-nucleon interaction and nuclear many-body theory. The main problems at the level of meson exchange physics have largely been solved, and we now have an effective nucleon-nucleon interaction, pioneered in a renormalization group formalism by several of us at Stony Brook and our colleagues at Naples, which is nearly universally accepted as the unique low-momentum interaction that includes all experimental information to date.Our present understanding of these issues is based on a multi-step development in which different scientific insights and a wide range of physical and mathematical methodologies fed into each other. It is best appreciated by looking at the 'steps along the way', starting with the pioneering work of Brueckner and his collaborators that was just as necessary and important as the insightful improvements to Brueckner's theory by Hans Bethe and his students. Moving on from there, microscopic methods for nuclear structure calculations using the Brueckner G-matrix, and later low-momentum nucleon interactions, were developed and applied. With their influential 1967 paper, Brown and Kuo prepared the effective theory that allowed the description of nuclear properties directly from the underlying nucleon-nucleon interaction. Later, the addition of 'Brown-Rho scaling' to the one-boson-exchange model deepened the understanding of nuclear matter saturation, carbon-14 dating and the structure of neutron stars.

This monograph teaches advanced undergraduate students and practitioners how to use folded diagrams to calculate properties of complex particle systems such as atomic nuclei, atoms and molecules in terms of interactions among their constituents. Emphasis is on systems with valence particles in open shells. Detailed diagram rules are derived and illustrated by simple examples. Applications include nuclear optical model potentials, meson-exchange theory of the nucleon-nucleon interactions and molecular-structure problems.