Daily Image
20-01-2014
In memoriam: Peter Fridman (1940-2014)
| Submitter: | Jan Noordam (ed.) |
| Description: | One of the side-effects of the demise of the Soviet Union was that many talented scientists found their way to knowledge-institutes in the West. ASTRON and JIVE have been fortunate in their share of clever "Russians". One of them was Dr Peter Aleksandrovich Fridman, who recently passed away. Peter was born in Odessa (now Ukraine), the undisputable "capital of humour" of the USSR. For three quarters of his life, he lived in Leningrad/St.Petersburg. He worked at the Special Astrophysical Observatory of the USSR/Russian Academy of Sciences, where he played a key role in developing advanced radio astronomy techniques for the RATAN-600 radio telescope in North Caucasus. In the 1970s, Peter was an active member of a small group of enthusiasts who proposed the national VLBI network now known as KVAZAR, a member of the European VLBI Network. He joined JIVE in 1997 as EVN System Scientist. In 1999 he transferred to NFRA (now ASTRON) as Telescope Physicist for the WSRT. He retired in 2005, but was retained for special projects for several years. One of his chief interests was Radio Frequency Interference, a very important subject for radio telescopes operating in densely populated Western Europe. He developed an RFI mitigation system for the WSRT, which was also used in Effelsberg (Germany). He applied his profound knowledge of mathematics and signal processing to radio interferometry (even with a single telescope!), correlators, radiometers, VLBI and transients. In his personal life, there was music (a huge collection of records, from classics to jazz), poetry (including ancient French), history and love of nature in all its manifestations. Perhaps not surprisingly, several papers on Peter’s desk through his very last days were dedicated to SETI. Only a month ago he paid a last visit to his daughter Marina in Israel. Peter has been laid to rest by his friends in the Jewish cemetry in Nijmegen, where he has been living happily with his partner Angela Needham for too few years. |
| Copyright: | A. Needham |
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