Felix Pirani
Felix Arnold Edward Pirani (2 February 1928 – 31 December 2015) was a British theoretical physicist, and professor at King's College London, specialising in gravitational physics and general relativity. Pirani and Hermann Bondi wrote a series of articles (1959 to 1989) that established the existence of plane wave solutions for gravitational waves based on general relativity.
Felix Pirani | |
|---|---|
| Born | 2 February 1928 England |
| Died | 31 December 2015 (aged 87) London, England |
| Citizenship | British |
| Alma mater | University of Toronto Carnegie Institute of Technology University of Cambridge |
| Known for | General relativity Gravitational wave solution |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physicist |
| Institutions | King's College London |
| Doctoral advisors | Alfred Schild Hermann Bondi |
| Doctoral students | Valentine Joseph |
During the last half of the 20th century Pirani was politically active, studied disarmament and advocated the responsible use of science.
His most famous scientific results include works on the physical meaning of the curvature tensor, gravitational waves, and the algebraic classification of the Weyl tensor, which he discovered in 1957 independently of A.Z. Petrov and is sometimes called the Petrov-Pirani classification.