Chen Jiyu (1921–2017)

An obituary of Chen Jiyu, a pioneer in Estuarine and Coastal Science in mainland China who died on Nov 28, 2017 is presented. He was a pleasant, graceful, and witty person, a pleasure to know. I feel compelled to write this obituary for him, since his death has suddenly deprived me and others of a good and kind friend. Chen's scientific mind was not mathematically trained but deeply intuitive. This fitted well with his interests in estuarine and coastal geomorphology and sedimentology. Chen sought knowledge widely. He was inspired by the ideas of traditional ancient Chinese river hydraulic engineers, such as Pan Jixun, who had proposed the idea of clearing sediments with converging flow. In the winter of 1960, Chen proposed the conceptual idea of Dynamic Geomorphology (in its original Chinese translation, but it seems to be equivalent to the phrase Morphodynamics which later appeared in English literature), and he edited the first Chinese Lecture Notes on Coastal Dynamic Geomorphology.