Rien van Genuchten: A short autobiography.

This document is a short autobiography by Rien van Genuchten, who received the 2023 Wolf Prize in agriculture for his work on water flow and contaminant transport in soils. Van Genuchten discusses his upbringing on a family farm in the Netherlands, his education in mathematics and tropical agriculture, and his research in soil physics and vadose zone hydrology at New Mexico State University and Princeton University. He describes his contributions to the field, including the development of mathematical models and analytical functions to describe unsaturated soil hydraulic properties. The text also covers the author's collaborations, international research experiences, and concerns about environmental issues and climate change. [Extracted from the article]