Howell Peregrine joined the Mathematics Department of
University of Bristol in 1964 following his undergraduate and postgraduate training at
Oxford and
Cambridge. He spent his entire career at Bristol. One of his most remarkable contributions was the theoretical prediction of a new nonlinear entity, now called the
Peregrine soliton, that may explain the formation of hydrodynamics
rogue waves and that has also been experimentally demonstrated more than 25 years later in the field of
nonlinear fiber optics and then in 2011 in hydrodynamics with experiments in a water wave tank. He was an
associate editor of the
Journal of Fluid Mechanics for more than 25 years. Howell Peregrine died suddenly after a short battle against
cancer. He was at the time a
professor emeritus of applied mathematics at the University of Bristol. == Personal ==