Professor Jerzy Lewandowski passed away on October 8, 2024. His illness, which I learned about from him personally on September 18 of this year, was a great shock to me. I was attending the Polish Relativity Society conference in Kazimierz Dolny at the time, and we corresponded with Jurek regarding the new POTOR elections. He had just undergone surgery, but he didn’t want to talk about it. On September 20, he wrote to me that he was feeling well.
Jerzy Krzysztof Lewandowski was born in Warsaw on September 15, 1959. He studied physics at the University of Warsaw, where in 1989, he obtained his PhD with a dissertation written under the supervision of Professor Andrzej Trautman: “The Application of Cauchy-Riemann Geometry to the Study of Gravitational Fields.” Andrzej Trautman was a student of Leopold Infeld, who in turn received his doctorate under the guidance of Professor Władysław Natanson at Jagiellonian University. Therefore, Jerzy Lewandowski is—was, I must sadly correct myself—in a certain sense an intellectual descendant of the Kraków scholar Natanson, as are most of the relativists from the University of Warsaw. Let us note, by the way, that in the same sense, nearly all of the active Kraków relativists of the last two decades are scientific descendants of Wojciech Rubinowicz—a physicist from Czernowitz, Lwów, and Warsaw. Jurek obtained his habilitation on September 28, 1997, with a thesis titled “The Holonomy Representation in the Quantization Program.” His academic title of professor— I was one of the reviewers—was awarded to him on November 17, 2005. For many years, he headed the Department of Relativity and Gravitation at the University of Warsaw. He supervised more than ten doctoral students.
I don’t remember when I first met Jurek. However, I recall a long two-month school and workshop at the Erwin Schrödinger Institute in Vienna, probably in the summer of 1994. Niall O’Murchadha, my friend and longtime collaborator, pointed out a group of young people around Abhay Ashtekar: “Look, they start at 10 AM and finish at 6 PM. They cover all the blackboards in the corridor with formulas!” There were about 12 blackboards, and they wrote on them with chalk. Among these young people was Dr. Jerzy Lewandowski, who was regarded as the main mathematics expert in Ashtekar’s group. Together, they were developing so-called loop quantum gravity—a minority direction in the field of quantum gravity—according to the views expressed by Penrose in his lecture series “Fashion, Faith and Fantasy,” about 20 percent of quantum gravity research at the time belonged to the loop quantum direction, while the rest consisted almost entirely of the “string” approach. Jurek Lewandowski, however, did not abandon research on classical gravity. For example, in the late 1990s, Ashtekar, Lewandowski, and their collaborators introduced the concept of isolated horizons. Many years later, Jurek came to Kraków with a lecture on new results related to these horizons. I don’t want to write here about the scientific research of the late Jerzy Lewandowski—you can find that online, and his students will undoubtedly write about it with greater expertise.
In 2007, a conference in honor of Myron Mathisson took place in Warsaw, organized mainly by Professor Trautman. I spoke with Jurek at the time about how it was high time to organize a major conference on general relativity in Poland. This came to fruition in 2013. Here are excerpts from the invitation, signed among others by Jurek:
„Dear Relativists, it is a great pleasure to invite you to the 20th International Conference on
General Relativity and Gravitation (GR20) and the 10th Amaldi Conference on Gravitational
Waves (Amaldi10) which takes place from 7th – 13th July 2013 at Uniwersytet Warszawski,
Warsaw, Poland….We look forward to welcoming you to Warsaw 2013!
Bala Iyer – Chair, GR20 Scientific Organizing Committee
Sheila Rowan – Chair, Amaldi 10 Scientific Organizing Committee
Jerzy Lewandowski – Chair, GR20/ Amaldi10 Local Organizing Committee,
President, Polish Society on Relativity
http://www.fuw.edu.pl/~potor/”
President, Polish Society on Relativity”
The Polish Relativity Society was established in 2011, among other reasons, to facilitate the organization of this conference. Professor Jerzy Lewandowski became the first president of PoToR. An unexpected bonus related to organizing the 2013 conference was a significant amount of funds left at the organizers’ disposal by the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation. These funds greatly facilitated the organization of PoToR’s first few conferences. The first one was held in Spała in 2014. I must note here that Jurek was a great patriot of the Polish Relativity Society and highly valued his presidency in our association. This must be understood to grasp what happened on June 3, 2016—Professor Lewandowski refused to run for the position of PoToR president during the general assembly convened at that time. In this situation, I was elected president, and Jurek became vice president. Our cooperation was harmonious. Professor Lewandowski was direct but courteous and even warm. He sought to ease conflicts. We discovered that we were both followers of Piłsudski—this probably made cooperation easier. In September 2020, my term ended, and Jurek Lewandowski again became PoToR’s president. He passed away a few weeks after his presidency concluded.
Dear Jurek, you will remain forever in our memory.
prof. Edward Malec
