Electronic edition ISSN 1574-0579

Imants Bucenieks, Agris Gailitis, Ernests Platacis, Sergey Ivanov

IN MEMORIAM AGRIS GAILITIS

Agris Gailitis left us in September 2024 after his final participation, while he was very tired and ill, at the PAMIR conference which was held from September 15 to 19 at Carry le Rouet in France. This is a huge loss for the Latvian scientific community, of which he was undoubtedly one of the leading figures. It is also a loss for world science and, particularly, for research in magnetohydrodynamics, of which he was an eminent representative.

We owe him, in particular, for his essential contribution to research into the mechanisms underlying the Earth's magnetic field, which is generally called the dynamo effect. He is the first to have carried out in the IPUL laboratory (Institute of Physics, University of Latvia) an experiment which definitively demonstrated the reality of the concept of a self-excited homogeneous dynamo, producing, just at the end of the last century in 1999, a magnetic field under the effect of a simple helical flow of liquid metal.

This prestigious result was confirmed shortly after by an experiment carried out in Karlsruhe (Germany) under the direction of Professor Ulrich M\"{u}ller.

The importance of this remarkable work was highly appreciated by the French Ambassador in Riga, who nominated Professor Gailitis for the Legion of Honor, the highest French distinction. This award was given to him in the premises of the French Embassy by M. Michel FOUCHER, Ambassador to Latvia at that time, who was interested in the Franco/Latvian Ampere project intended to support the scientific activity of IPUL, recognized as a world leader in the field of magnetohydrodynamics.

I would also like to add a personal note in memory of Agris Gailitis. For the first time I went to Latvia in the 1980s to attend a conference on magnetohydrodynamics. Latvia was still under Soviet domination. The oral presentations of the Latvian researchers were given in Russian with an official Russian observer who translated presentations into English, checking that the text was compatible with USSR regulations. It was the same for the questions and answers which were controlled by this official probably from the KGB.

In my memory, Agris Gailitis was the only one who had given his presentation directly in English and answered questions directly, without an interpreter. I was a young researcher at the time, and this memory had an impact on me. Agris Gailitis was a courageous man.

Antoine Alemany