Christian Fronsdal

Our friend and colleague Christian Fronsdal died on March 3, 2024 while visiting his wife’s family in Manila.

Professor  Fronsdal  received his PhD in 1957 from Prof. Bob Finkelstein here at UCLA. He joined our department faculty four years later and remained at UCLA until his retirement in 2018, continuing working in research until his last days.

Professor Fronsdal’s main interests were always in developing modern mathematical tools in view of applying them to theoretical physics, especially particle physics. His early research  made important contributions to the theory of massless particles with higher spin, to classifying the then recently discovered strongly interacting particles using Lie group representations, and to the extension of the Schwarzschild metric in general relativity.  Then he developed an understanding of quantization as a deformation of classical theories.

Fronsdal’s life outside of physics was adventurous. He built a house in Los Angeles and a trimaran while at Abdus Salam’s International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste.  A true Viking, he sailed across both the Atlantic and the Pacific in the trimaran and later catamarans during many summers, including passing Cape Horn. He was passionate about playing Go.

He is survived by his wife Amelita Dolorico, his children Tina Marie and Egil Fronsdal, and his step-children Jenny and Lillian Llacer.