Bohdan Paczyński - Biography

Bohdan Paczyński

       Bohdan Paczyński, born on the eighth of February in 1940, was a Polish astronomer and a leading scientist in theory of the evolution of stars, accretion discs and gamma ray bursts. He was originally born in Vilnius, Lithuania, but his family decided to leave for Poland where they settled in Krakow in 1945 and then Warsaw in 1949.

       At the age of 18 Paczyński published his first scientific article in Acta Astronomica.  Between 1959 and 1962 he studied astronomy at the University of Warsaw. Two years later he received a doctorate under tutelage of Stefan Piotrowski and Włodzimierz Zonn. In 1962 Paczyński became a member of the Centre of Astronomy of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where he continued to work for nearly 20 years. In 1974 he received habilitation and in 1979 became a professor. Thanks to his works on theoretical astronomy, at the age of 36 he became the youngest member of the Polish Academy of Science. In 1981 Paczyński visited the United States, where he gave a series of lectures at Caltech.

       Paczyński was the creator of Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment and All Sky Automated Survey. His new methods of discovering cosmic objects and measuring their mass by using gravitational lenses gained him international recognition. He is acknowledged for coining the term micro-lensing. He was also an early proponent of the idea that gamma-ray bursts are at cosmological distances. His research concentrated on stellar evolution, gravitational lensing and gravitational micro-lensing, variable stars, gamma-ray bursts, and galactic structure.

       In 1999, he became the first astronomer to receive all three major awards of the Royal Astronomical Society, by winning the Gold Medal, having won the Eddington Medal in 1987 and the George Darwin Lectureship in 1995. He was honored with the title of Doctor Honoris Causa by Wrocław University in Poland on June 29, 2005 and Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń in Poland on September 22, 2006. In January 2006 he was awarded Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the American Astronomical Society, "for his highly original contributions to a wide variety of fields including advanced stellar evolution, the nature of gamma ray bursts, accretion in binary systems, gravitational lensing, and cosmology. His research has been distinguished by its creativity and breadth, as well as the stimulus it has provided to highly productive observational investigations". He died of brain cancer on April 19, 2007 in Princeton, New Jersey.