During my final year as a PhD student at Harvard in 1966, my supervisor arranged for me to attend an international oceanography conference in Moscow. During my two-week time there, I met Russian graduate students as well as internationally renowned oceanographers. As this was the height of the cold warCold war, I felt certain that I was always under constant surveillance by the KGB (the Russian secret police). And one day I had a frightening experience when two well-dressed strangersMoscow strangers (agents) joined me for a coffee in a large park and started asking me many questions about America. While at the conference I shared a hotel room with Robert Deitz, who coined the term “sea floor spreading”. At one of the conference sessions, I heard Canadian oceanographer RobertRobert Dietz StewartRobert StewartUBC OC FRS FRSC deliver an inspiring lecture on ocean turbulenceOcean turbulence. A year later, he helped me getUBC (my first tenure-track position at) a tenure track position at UBC, where I would spend the first two decades of my academic career as a professor of mathematics and oceanography.