David Brunt

Sir David Brunt was a Welsh meteorologist, born at Staylittle in Montgomeryshire on 17 June 1886, the youngest of the nine children of the farmworker John Brunt. He attended Abertillery School and in 1904 won a scholarship to the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth, gaining a first class honours degree in mathematics in 1907. He then went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 1909 was elected to the Isaac Newton studentship at the National Solar Physics Observatory. He later lectured in mathematics at the University of Birmingham, served in the meteorological section of the Royal Engineers in the First World War, and joined the Meteorological Office. He accepted Sir Napier Shaws invitation to join him as part-time professor of meteorology at Imperial College, London, and after Shaw retired became the first full-time professor of meteorology in Britain, holding the chair from 1934 to 1952. He was vice-president of the Royal Society from 1949 to 1957, and the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica is named after him. He died on 5 February 1965.