The Henri Poincaré Prize 1997 was awarded to Arthur Wightman for his central role in the foundations of the general theory of quantized fields, the powerful impetus impressed promoting resarch on various aspects of Modern Mathematical Physics (on constructive QFT, and on domains ranging from statistical mechanics, dynamical systems and ergodic theory to integrable systems, Schroedinger Operators and renormalization theory), for his expository contributions of a masterly level to mathematical physics.