Hans Adolf Buchdahl

Hans Adolf Buchdahl (7 July 1919 to 7 January 2010) was a German-born Australian physicist who contributed to general relativity, thermodynamics and optics. He is particularly known for developing f(R) gravity and for Buchdahl's theorem on the interior of a spherical star in the Schwarzschild solution. Born in Mainz into a Jewish family, he was taken to England in 1933 by his brother, the philosopher of science Gerd Buchdahl, and studied at Imperial College, London. Deported to Australia in 1940 aboard the HMT Dunera, he was interned and then released to the Physics Department of the University of Tasmania, where he worked on formulas for optical aberration coefficients used in designing imaging systems, and took his doctorate in 1949. From 1963 until his retirement he was professor and head of the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Australian National University in Canberra.