Prof. Wojciech Kopczyński (zm.2022)

From the life of professor Wojciech Kopczyński

Wojciech Kopczyński was born on 12^th December 1946 in Toruń (Poland) in a family of teachers. His primary and secondary education took place in Warsaw, where he attended the Liceum Ogólnokształcące no. 1. He graduated with master’s degree at the Faculty of Physics of the University of Warsaw in 1969. The topic of his thesis was “Conformal geometry of spacetime according to R. Penrose”. The same year he was employed in the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the Faculty of Physics and became a senior assistant researcher.

In 1973 he defended his Ph. D. thesis “Influence of spacetime torsion on the structure of models of the Universe” under the supervision of professor Andrzej Trautman. The thesis won an award of Minister of Science, Higher Education and Technology. Subsequently he spend 8 month on an internship in Paris where he collaboraated with André Lichnerowicz and Yvonne Choquet-Hruhat. In this period Kopczyński continued the research begun in his Ph. D. thesis about the Einstein-Cartan theory. In 1976 he was on a 3 moth internship in United States and visited many research facilities: Princeton, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Austin, CalTech and Chicago. Between 1979 and 1981 he was at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Cologne where he worked on the teleparallel theories of gravity under the supervision of professor Friedrich W. Hehl as a part of Kopczyński’s Humboldt fellowship. Later, back in Warsaw he worked on the lagange dynamics of particles and fluids with spin and become an associate of the Editoral Office of the Polish Scientifil Publisher (PWN).

In 1984 he co-authored a relativity coursebook “Czasoprzestrzeń I grawitacja” PWN 1984 (“Spacetime and relativity”). The book helped raise generations of relativists in Poland and enyojed favourable reviews all around the world.

In 1988 professor Kopczyński defended his Habilitation at the Faculty of Physics of the University of Warsaw on the topic of “Dynamics of Geometry and Fluids. Variational Principles and a Cosmological Model”. A year later he become assistant professor and in 1991 a professor of the University of Warsaw.

In the nineties he frequented SISSA in Triest and Erwin Schrodinger Institue in Vienna where he worked on algebraic approach to spinors. From 1994 he was a member of The New York Academy of Science.

Citing the last sentence of his 1996 self-report: “My life is going well; I am married and have two promising sons”.