John Knauss has a lot of facets. From 1968–1987, while I was at La Spezia and Woods Hole, he was just an “important name” I had seen on ocean circulation papers, in charge of conferences, as the University of Rhode Island (URI) Dean, etc. He attended a few of the Friday night biweekly Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Seminars that rotated between Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard, with occasional forays to Yale, Brown, and URI. He did not engage in the usual mathematical questions-and-answers, but saved his bullets for probing questions like “Why do you think that?” and “How did you come to that conclusion?” and “So what?” These are paraphrases, not quotes: I do not remember the details of his comments, but remember being impressed that he was not apparently enamored of or swayed by all the integral signs; I sensed a kindred spirit.

Briscoe, M.G. 2001. Vignette. Oceanography 14(2):22, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2001.36.

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