Steven Vogel (1940-2015)

About a dozen years ago, calling up a degree of hubris I now find quite inexplicable, I wrote a book about the interface between biology and fluid dynamics. I had never deliberately written a book, and I had never taken a proper course in fluids. But I had learned through teaching—both something about the subject and something about the dearth of material that might provide a useful avenue of approach for biologist and engineer. Each seemed dazzled and dismayed by the complexity of the other’s domain. The book happened in a hurry, in a kind of race against the impending end of a sabbatical semester, and in a kind of mad fit of passion driven by simple realization (and astonishment) that it was actually happening.

The reception of Life in Moving Fluids turned out to surpass my most self-indulgent fantasies—it reached the people I hoped to reach, from ecologist and marine biologist to physical and applied scientists of various persuasions, and it seems to have played a catalytic or instigational role in quite a few instances. Quite clearly the book has been the most important thing of a professional sort that I’ve ever done: certainly that’s true if measured by the frequency with which the first punning sentence of its preface is flung back at me (That my writing has been more important than my research in furthering my area of science suggests that doing hands-on science, which I enjoy, is really just a personal indulgence—quite a curious state of affairs!)