Fifty years of Middle European Cooperation: a personal perspective of the physical evolution in statistical mechanics and condensed matter

Abstract The 50th Anniversary of Middle European Cooperation (MECO) conferences is celebrated by recalling how from the programs of MECO meetings, it is possible to follow the evolution of Condensed Matter and Statistical Mechanics of the last fifty years. It will be unravelled a personal view of how MECO meetings in the decades actively followed the changes of interpretative paradigms and perspectives in condensed matter and statistical mechanics, ranging from Landau quasiparticle to critical phenomena, scaling and renormalization group, from high temperature superconductivity to complexity.