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A New Phase of Matter: Quark-Gluon Plasma Beyond the Hagedorn Critical Temperature

I retrace the developments from Hagedorn's concept of a limiting temperature for hadronic matter to the discovery and characterization of the quark-gluon plasma as a new state of matter. My recollections begin with the transformation more than 30 years ago of Hagedorn's original concept into its modern interpretation as the "critical" temperature separating the hadron gas and quark-gluon plasma phases of strongly interacting matter. This was followed by the realization that the QCD phase transformation could be studied experimentally in high-energy nuclear collisions. I describe here my personal effort to help develop the strangeness experimental signatures of quark and gluon deconfinement and recall how the experimental program proceeded soon to investigate this idea, at first at the SPS, then at RHIC, and finally at LHC. As it is often the case, the experiment finds more than theory predicts, and I highlight the discovery of the "perfectly" liquid quark-gluon plasma at RHIC. I conclude with an outline of future opportunities, especially the search for a critical point in the QCD phase diagram.