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Abdus Salam was a great man in more than one dimension. The conception and building of the ICTP system required much more than the intelligence of a great scientist. I will stress those other facets that made him such a unique personality: the optimism that coloured his views about men and women, his love for his people and his commitment to the less favoured peoples of the world and a crucial ingredient, his deep and complex sense of ethical values that pushed him towards engagement in the political reality. Endowed with a formidable power of persuasion and a healthy lack of respect for norms or rules that are not based on justice he made a big difference on many of us and will remain as an icon for future generations. I will also describe the final touches that Salam’s collaborators and successors had to add to keep his heritage flourishing.

For more than 50 years, the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics has fostered the growth and sustainability of physics and mathematics in the developing world, benefitting hundreds of thousands of scientists. What began as a dream by its founder, Pakistani Nobel Laureate Abdus Salam, has become a first-rate international research hub connecting scientists from all corners of the globe. As the social and economic situations in many developing countries has shifted, ICTP has responded with the creation of relevant research and training programmes that continue to boost science in disadvantaged parts of the world. Today, ICTP remains a beacon of hope for scientists who aspire to greatness.

The charge given to me by the organisers of the memorial meeting for Prof. Abdus Salam’s 90th birthday is to recall my personal impressions of him and review an aspect of the standard model (SM) physics related to my work. Salam was, first and foremost, a brilliant theoretical physicist whose work is still very much en vogue, currently being tested precisely by the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Salam was, however, equally effective as a scientific advisor to many institutions, such as IAEA and CERN, but also to the government of Pakistan as the chief scientific strategist. He was also an untiring advocate of scientific research and higher education in developing countries, which took a concrete form in the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste. I discuss these aspects of his scientific life seen from my perspective in the first part. In the second part of my talk, which may appear as a disjoint piece to the first, I summarise some selected topics in rare B-decays — the current flavour physics frontier. Experiments carried out over several decades are largely in agreement with the SM, thanks also to dedicated theoretical effort in their interpretation. However, this field is undergoing an anomalous phase in a number of key measurements, in particular reported by LHCb, triggering a very lively debate and model building. These anomalies, which I review here, are too numerous to be ignored, but none is individually significant enough to announce a breakdown of the SM.