In Memoriam Dr. M. Benno Blumenthal
1959 - 2018



With neither grimace nor maliciousness
death chooses from its bulging catalogue
the poet, not his words, however strong,
but just - unfailingly - the poet's self.
It has no use for thickets or for fields
or seas in their high, bright magnificence.
Death is a prodigal, it piles
a horde of hearts upon a wisp of time.

From Joseph Brodsky's "Verses on the Death of T.S. Eliot" (January 12, 1965)
[Translated from the Russian by George L. Kline,
The Russian Review, 27, No. 2(April 1968), pp. 195-198]

Dr. Martin Benno Blumenthal passed away on 15 December 2018. Among other things that he has done in his life, he applied his unmatched intellectual powers and vision to conceptualizing and developing Data Library (DL) system software, which transforms a regular linux workstation into a nearly-magical data server, enabling its users to perform virtually any calculations with gridded geophysical data sets that they can imagine, to see the results they got, and to bring them home in any form they like. Together with the DL server (in fact, even before he started developing it), Benno created Ingrid, a scripting language that the DL understands and obeys, and whose laconic, efficient, and witty nature brings joy even to the most mundane data processing tasks that climatologists face daily. And when used as a tool for genuine research, Ingrid tends to leave us in awe of its power, and with a sense of pride, usually combined with a bit of surprise, in being able, once again, to summon and control such a power (and to do this with but a few words or lines!) -- and, of course, with deep gratitude to Benno for giving us the lasting pleasure of using and admiring his invention.



Obituary from the International Research Institute for Climate and Society