Book excerpt: This conference is the first of what is expected to be a sequence of similar conferences on the teaching of the large and important field of condensed matter physics. The objective is to bring together active research workers and teachers for the discussion of frontier topics, and for cooperative efforts to produce, or at least, to plan the production of curricular materials on the topic of the conference. Reports of the lectures by Nobel Laureates, G Binnig and K von Klitzing are included.