Vilhelm Friman Koren Bjerknes, 1862-1951

Vilhelm Friman Koren Bjerknes, doyen of meteorologists, died at Oslo on 9 April 1951 at the age of eighty-nine. The family Bjerknes can be traced far back as farmers in Norway. Vilhelm Bjerknes’ grandfather, Abraham Isaksen Bjerknes, was the youngest son of a farmer of Sandsvar, a village in the valley of the Laagen about forty miles south-west of Oslo. As youngest son he had no farm to inherit, so he went to Copenhagen, qualified as a veterinary surgeon, and on his return to Norway entered the Army in that capacity. He married a farmer’s daughter, Elen Brigitte Holmen, of Drammen, at the head of Drammen Fjord, about twenty miles from Sandvar across two intervening ridges of hills and a valley. They had a daughter and two sons. Twelve years after the birth, in 1825, of V. Bjerknes’ father, C. A. Bjerknes, Abraham Bjerknes died and left his widow in straitened circumstances. She managed, however, to send her sons to the University where C. A. Bjerknes showed marked mathematical ability. After a few years as schoolmaster and University lecturer he made, to quote V. Bjerknes, ‘foreign scientific travels, indispensable for anyone in our restricted situation who wishes to develop into a Man of Science’.