Remo Ruffini at 80:
My Fifty Years Orbiting Remo's World Line? [1972-2022]

bob jantzen  May 17, 2022 [and Happy DayAfter Birthday Roy! !!]
    [browse this hyperlinked trip down memory lane yourself at bottom right corner of my "Robert Jantzen Villanova" webpage]

GR: mathematical foundations?

bob reviews his hard to characterize junior partnership with a unique personality in the evolution of relativistic astrophysics,
which began EXACTLY 50 years ago! [I am 10 years minus 1 month behind]
[20 years ago I covered our first 30 years at RJR 60 [group photo] [Wimmer BH painting]
Caught in the Relativity Web: My 30 Years Near Remo's World Line]

bob is the unofficial (people) historian of G9/ICRA/ICRANet
and fills out Demetri's half hour slot liberated due to his post-COVID complications.

Remo has had a talent for attracting very interesting people to his evolving relativistic astrophysics circle, and I have been able to meet many of them over the years.

The time line:

• 1960-1975: "golden age of general relativity" [wiki]
  [Remo at Princeton: 1967-1974]
  [    bob at Princeton: 1970-1974]
  
  
•  1972 Princeton [I missed his first 6-10 years of activity since his Rome university degree 1966]
  
  bob meets Remo Ruffini [wiki] at Princeton: Differential Geometry for GR [thanks Jim Isenberg!]
         and Bob Leach, Mark Johnston (ICRA/ICRANet logo!), Rick Hanni (see Godel link)
  bob meets Luigi Bianchi [wiki] translating 90 Italian pages based on college Spanish (Remo's idea),
      later published as a Golden Oldie in Gen Relativ Grav nearly 30 years later
      [mathematical foundation of spatially homogeneous cosmology; bob plays here for a couple decades]
  bob meets Kurt Godel [wiki]
     
  bob sort of meets  Demetri Christodoulou [wiki]
  
  
• 1974 bob meets Abe Taub at UC Berkeley (thanks to Remo, diverted from College Park)
     Abe was part of the Einstein-Robertson-Wigner-Godel Princeton Math Community in the 1930s
     [bob puts it online: 2000]
  
  
• 1974? bob meets Thibault Damour [wiki] during his California visit with Remo
  bob meets Napoli GR at Remo cosmology school at Erice [first impact with Italy]
  
  
• 1978 bob becomes honorary Roman at La Sapienza Fisica [vanity photos]
  [part time American expat? grounded in 2020 but made it back every other year since]
  
  
• 1979 bob meets Marcel Grossmann (MG2) [1976: MG1 starts with Abdus Salam in Trieste]
  helps organize/edit proceedings MG7-15 1985-2018.
  
  
• 1981 bob meets the Vatican Observatory 
  [Remo partners with George Coyne; Bill Stoeger, group(late90s) ]
           1985 MG5 & Pope John Paul II
  
  
• 1982 MG3 in Shanghai
          (Tsvi Piran enters China with Ruffini travel document created from bob's passport format)
  
  
• late 1980s- early 1990s: golden years of G9 [1985 ICRA is born]
  
  
• 1988 GR at Sapienza history: math guys Carlo Cattaneo [wiki]
       [Levi-Civita descendent wiki, Giorgio Ferrarese follow wiki ] and 3 plus 1 leads to
  Remo suggesting we think about it:
  bob joints up with Donato Bini and Paolo Carini for
  The Many Faces of Gravitoelectromagnetism (Carini, Bini, Jantzen 1992);
  mathematical games with black holes etc.
  
  
• 1988 MG6 in Perth, bob insists on collecting participant emails,
           MacCallum uses them to create what is now Hyperspace@gu.
  
  
• 1990s bob meets Fang Li-Zhi and wife Shuxian Li [lost ICRA photos; Leopold; China 1981?, Nice 1990; 2010?]
  
  
• 2001 the Fermi project begins, but never ends eventually bifurcates;
      [2012 donato, andrea, bob and remo discuss the famous 4/3 mass problem of Fermi (never published),
       written when Fermi was a university student and GR was only a few years old]
  
  
• 2000 teens Donato Bini teams up with Thibault Damour [~ past decade]
  
  
• 2015 MG14 bob meets Claudia Graf-Grossmann, grandaughter of Marcel, author of his bio
  
  
• 2021 bob retires from ICRANet with final push on pandemic/Sapienza delayed MG15 proceedings

YouTube talk recording (two hour mark 17 May program)

jantzen website