Andrzej Trautman

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Andrzej Mariusz Trautman (born January 4, 1933) is a leading mathematical physicist who has made important contributions to classical gravitation in general and to general relativity in particular.

Trautman was born in Warsaw, Poland into an artistic family. His father, Mieczyslaw, was a painter and taught drawing at a secondary school in Warsaw. He was murdered during a routine Nazi raid of Polish intelligentsia. His mother, Eliza Trautman (nee Andres), was French, though she was born in Spain. During the Warsaw Uprising, Andrzej's elementary school was closed down and he was forced to live with his mother's parents in Paris after the razing of Warsaw by Hitler (Warsaw Uprising#Destruction of the city).^[1] Because of this, he only had two years of primary school. He returned to Poland after the reconstruction but ended up only receiving three years of secondary schooling. He was considered to be poorly educated. However, in 1955, he earned an engineering degree from the Warsaw University of Technology.^[2] Trautman then switched studies to physics, studying at first under Leopold Infeld at the Institute of Physics in Warsaw. Other early influences included Felix Pirani, Hermann Bondi, Ezra Newman, Arthur Komar, Englebert Schücking, and Roger Penrose, all of whom also made important contributions to the Golden Age of Relativity (roughly 1960-1974).

In 1960, Trautman and Ivor Robinson discovered an important family of exact solutions of the Einstein field equation, the Robinson/Trautman null dusts^{[citation needed]}. Later he worked on the Einstein-Cartan theory of gravitation and interacted with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

Trautman's doctoral students include the physicist M. Demianski (who discovered another noteworthy exact solution) and a well-known mathematician J. P. Lasota (author of several mathematical textbooks).

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