Jerzy Plebański

Jerzy Plebański
Jerzy Plebański
Born	(1928-05-07)May 7, 1928 Warsaw, Poland
Died	August 24, 2005(2005-08-24) (aged 77) Mexico City, Mexico
Residence	Mexico
Nationality	Polish
Known for	Electrodynamics, General Relativity
Scientific career
Fields	Physicist

Jerzy Franciszek Plebański (May 7, 1928 – August 24, 2005) was a Polish theoretical physicist known for his work in General Relativity, nonlinear Electrodynamics, and mathematical physics. He spent much of his career in Mexico, where he was a long-serving researcher at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies (CINVESTAV) in Mexico City.

Biography

Education

Plebański was born on May 7, 1928, in Warsaw, Poland. He studied at the University of Warsaw, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1954 under the supervision of Wojciech Rubinowicz.

Career

Plebański began his academic career at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the University of Warsaw, where he served as Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics from 1958 to 1962 and later as Vice-Rector of the university from 1969 to 1973. In 1958 he was a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and he worked at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from 1958 to 1960.

In 1962 he joined the Center for Research and Advanced Studies (CINVESTAV) in Mexico City, where he was affiliated during 1962–1967 and again from 1973 until his death in 2005. He lived in Mexico for approximately 40 years. Early in his career he was associated in Poland with Prof. Leopold Infeld, with whom he co-authored work on motion in general relativity.

Scientific contributions

Plebański contributed to several areas of theoretical physics, including nonlinear electrodynamics and its quantization, relativistic equations of motion, and spinor methods in general relativity. He is associated with the Plebański tensor and with the so-called "Plebański action," a first-order formulation of general relativity used to describe vacuum and self-dual solutions of the Einstein equations through what is known as the "Heavenly equation." These formulations remain widely used in the study of self-dual gravity and integrable systems.

Honors

Plebański's contributions were commemorated in the volume Topics in Mathematical Physics, General Relativity and Cosmology in Honor of Jerzy Plebański, a collection of invited papers published in his honor.

Prof. Plebański was an important researcher in theoretical physics.  In Poland, he had been a disciple of Prof. Leopold Infeld.  He later lived for 40 years in Mexico, where he passed away on August 23, 2005.  Based on a conversation with him, his colleagues composed the following short technical note on an interesting open problem in general relativity theory (GRT). - Galilean Electrodynamics, V16, N6 (Nov/Dec 2005).

External links

• Jerzy Plebański on Wikipedia