The 40th anniversary of the Khokhlo-Zabolotskaya equation was marked by a special session of the 158th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (October 2009, San Antonio, Texas, United States). A response on the part of Acoustical Physics to this date is also quite appropriate, all the more so because Russian scientists were the main players involved in formulating and using this equation during the period of time between the middle 1960s and middle 1980s. In this article, the author—a participant and witness of those events—presents his view of the dramatic history of the formulation of this equation and related models in the context of earlier and independent work in aerodynamics and nonlinear wave theory. The main problems and physical phenomena described by these mathematical models are briefly considered.