Howard Brenner: Visionary researcher, profound scholar and close friend

During his long (60$+$ years) professional career, Howard Brenner made an astonishingly large number of seminal contributions in a variety of subjects such as, to name only a small fraction: particle motions in very viscous fluids, the mechanics of complex fluids, multiphase flow in porous media, emulsion rheology and many others. In my talk I shall focus on a few of his early publications in ``low-Reynolds number fluid mechanics'' which helped transform that subject from one that was originally viewed as being of only academic interest (and, therefore, ``very dull and of no practical value whatsoever'') into the presently exciting and active field of ``micro-fluidics.''