Saturday, April 07, 2007

Knut Schmidt-Nielsen 1915 – 2007

I missed the fact that Knut Schmidt-Nielsen passed away a few months ago. Every zoologist working today owes him a great debt, and as undergraduates we all read his books, "Scaling: Why Is Animal Size So Important?" and "How Animals Work".

The Journal of Experiemental Biology has a nice obituary in its recent March issue;
“Knut Schmidt-Nielsen was one of the most prominent and most successful animal physiologists. Throughout his long scientific career, he addressed puzzling questions about how animals work by looking at how nature has solved these problems when enabling diverse animals to cope with varied functional stresses imposed by environment, specific niches or variations in body size.”