It is with great sadness that we write to let you know that our dear friend Felix Pirani passed away rather unexpectedly but peacefully on 31 December 2015.
Felix made important contributions to General Relativity, which included: independent discovery of the Petrov Classification and its use to give an invariant characterization of the gravitational radiation fields; fundamental work on gravitational waves, in collaboration with Herman Bondi and Ivor Robinson; as well as important work on an axiomatic formulation of GR in collaboration with Jurgen Ehlers and Alfred Schild, in which both the conformal and projective structures of the spacetime and their compatibility conditions are deduced from their axioms.
He will be sorely missed as a much loved father, partner, mentor and friend to many, not least because of his many struggles to make this a better world.
Ted Newman, Abner Solland, John Stachel, Reza Tavakol
Further information on Felix Pirani’s work can be found at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Pirani
https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/34463
Gen Relativ Gravit (2012) 44:1581–1586 DOI 10.1007/s10714-012-1352-5 GOLDEN OLDIE EDITORIAL
“Editorial note by Andrzej Trautman to: J. Ehlers, F. A. E. Pirani and A. Schild, The geometry of free fall and light propagation”