Otto Renner, 1883-1960

Abstract

Otto Renner was a man of retiring disposition who, in a noisy world, made discoveries which quietly transformed our knowledge of his subject. The difficulties that we are bound to encounter in describing his life make it all the more important to find out, while the story is still fresh, how his mind worked, and why he attacked the problems he solved. To do this I shall have to consider his own activities in themselves. But I shall also have to consider how they are related to those of his predecessors and contemporaries whom he supported, displaced, or merely built upon.