It is with great sadness that I inform this community of the death of Richard Reyment, who passed away at his home in Sollentuna, Sweden, just outside Stockholm, on 30 March. A brief autobiography of Richard’s life and work is available at: http://richardreyment.com/index.html. I would not presume to improve on the information he has already provided there other than to add that he was my good friend, a valued colleague and true intellectual of unusually broad interests, abilities and accomplishments. I often wince when I hear someone described as a “polymath” these days as the term has become devalued through overuse. However, Richard was a genuine polymath as his bibliography all too readily attests. Over a career that spanned more than half a century Richard assimilated a vast body of knowledge of about quantitative data analysis, morphometrics, palaeontology, geology and a variety of other fields by remaining an active and engaged researcher as well as a teacher, editor, author and administrator. In pursuing these interests he had the good fortune to be able to undertake this assimilation piece-by-piece, paper-by-paper, book-by-book as these fields were developing; through their heydays at it were. Now, there is simply too much information being published by too many people on too many topics to allow anyone to develop the sort of synoptic understanding Richard achieved for even a single speciality, much less half-a-dozen. People like Richard are now passing from the scene. That is a tragedy for us all. Possibly with one or two rare exceptions, we’ll not see their like again.
Richard’s daughter Britt-Louse has informed me that his funeral will be held in the next few weeks and will be attended only by the family. Norm MacLeod _____________________________________________________ Professor Norman MacLeod Dean of Postgraduate Education and Training The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD (0)207 942-5204 (Office Landline) (0)785 017-1787 (Mobile) http://www.nhm.ac.uk/hosted_sites/paleonet/MacLeod/ Department of Earth Sciences, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK Nanjing Institute of Geology & Palaeontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 39 Beijing, Donglu, Nanjing, China _____________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________ Professor Norman MacLeod Dean of Postgraduate Education and Training The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD (0)207 942-5204 (Office Landline) (0)785 017-1787 (Mobile) http://www.nhm.ac.uk/hosted_sites/paleonet/MacLeod/ Department of Earth Sciences, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK Nanjing Institute of Geology & Palaeontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 39 Beijing, Donglu, Nanjing, China _____________________________________________________ -- MORPHMET may be accessed via its webpage at http://www.morphometrics.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MORPHMET" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to morphmet+unsubscr...@morphometrics.org.
