One View of the Gdh Sum Rule

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the origins of the GDH sum rule. The rule can be traced back to work on dispersion relations for Compton scattering in the 1950's, and can be inferred under certain conditions from a paper by Gell-Mann, Goldberger and Thirring in 1954, among others. In this talk the author will describe how Compton scattering dominated his work in physics since 1959. This work involved not only the sum rule, but also his Ph.D. thesis and several related papers. It was also a catalyst for his career change from physics to computer science in the early 1970's.