Hans A. Buchdahl (1919 – 2010), born in Mainz, Germany; sent to London in
1933 for higher education by his parents in view of the Nazi rule. After having obtained his degree at the
London College of Science, in 1939, he was detained as a German National and deported to Australia in
1940. His abilities in mathematics were recognized soon and he became teaching assistant at the University
of Tasmania in Hobart, part-time lecturer and research physicist. He received a doctorate there in 1948 and
a DSc from Imperial College, London, in 1956. As a reader in Tasmania, he was called to become professor
and head of the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Australian National University, in 1963 until
retirement in 1984. His broad interests included geometrical optics, thermodynamics, theories of
gravitation as well as tensor and spinor analysis. He wrote well received books in all of these fields.