LAUSR

On October 27, 2022, the inspirational and highly influential hydrologist Ignacio Rodríguez-Iturbe suddenly passed away. He was Distinguished University Professor and Wofford Cain I Chair Professor Emeritus at Texas A&M University, and James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University. Ignacio, a master of contemporary thought and a pathbreaking scientist, was at the center of the cultural process that transformed the field of hydrology from an empirical branch of applied engineering to a mainstream environmental science. He showed creatively and rigorously that the analysis, synthesis, and sampling of hydrological processes could pave the way for a new and deeper understanding of floods, droughts, and a "fair" distribution of water, including water controls on living communities—in a nutshell, how nature works through the inner workings of the water cycle. Rodríguez-Iturbe’s pioneering work has influenced generations of researchers across many fields and around the world and left a long-lasting legacy through many disciples and in a large number of young people, students of all types, whose lives he changed for the good by his intellectual mark and empathic maieutics. Ignacio made each student and collaborator alike feel special wherever he went, and mobilized entire communities to shift their foci to modern hydrologic research. Within hydrology, his work was wide-ranging and highly mathematical, blending theory from spatial point processes and fractal mathematics to the dynamics of river basins and other hydrological patterns. However, his contributions went well beyond hydrology to include ecophysiology and plant community ecology, and his efforts basically created a new discipline at the interface between ecology and hydrology. According to Google Scholar, he has an h-index above 100, and he remained active until his death (Fig. 1). Ignacio Rodríguez-Iturbe was born in Maracaibo, Venezuela on March 8, 1942, in a large family blessed with deep intellectual gifts. He was educated in the Universidad del Zulia in Maracaibo, where he received a C.E. with maximum honors in 1963. He received a MS at the California Institute of Technology in 1965 and a Ph.D. from Colorado State University in 1967. In 1964, he married Mercedes Maiz, who gave him Oscar, Ignacio, Olimpia, Juan, and Luis. Ignacio only recently retired from Texas A&M, so that he and Mercedes could return home to their native Venezuela, where much of their family lived. Ignacio served as faculty in various universities: the Universidad del Zulia in Maracaibo (from where he graduated and where his father had long been Dean of the Faculty of Engineering), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, the Universidad Simon Bolivar in Caracas, the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Texas A&M at College Station, and for twenty years Princeton University, where he was the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He held various appointments as visiting Professor in several countries, where his role in fostering the establishment of thriving research communities in various domains of hydrology was remarkable. This was largely because of his ease in communicating and sharing ideas and knowledge with others, the empathy he emanated, and the enthusiasm he was capable of injecting especially in the young: these gifts proved instrumental, in particular, in the transformative development of the Italian hydrologic community as a spinoff of his regular visits. Several of his former students and postdocs now hold academic positions in major institutions worldwide, and his countless collaborations spread his influence even further.