Concluding Remarks

Extract

In one sense our subject is an old one, dating back more than two centuries to the work of John Michell on statistics of visual star pairs. In another sense, it is both young and rapidly growing. The first meeting devoted exclusively to binary systems took place in 1966 in Uccle, Belgium, followed by the first IAU Joint Discussion on the subject in 1967 and IAU Colloquia 6 and 18 in 1969 and 1972. From this average of less that one meeting with published proceedings per year, our gatherings have proliferated to about five per year in the mid 80’s. I am inclined to suspect that the topic of formation and evolution of binary stars is now too broad to fit into any one meeting, room, day, or mind.