Howard Brenner: Visionary researcher, profound scholar and close friend

During his long (60+ years) professional career, Howard Brenner made an astonishingly large number of seminal contributions in a variety of subjects such as, to name only a small fraction: particle motions in very viscous fluids, the mechanics of complex fluids, multiphase flow in porous media, and emulsion rheology. In my talk I shall focus on a few of his early publications in “low-Reynolds number fluid mechanics” which helped transform that subject from one that was originally viewed as being of only academic interest (and, therefore, “very dull and of no practical value whatsoever”) into the presently exciting and active field of “micro-fluidics”.