After spending about ten months in Germany, he returned, with his mother (his father had died in 1941) to Poland.
In France, Trautman attended a Polish secondary school from which he graduated in 1949 and returned to Poland shortly afterwards.
After earning a master's degree under the influence of Warsaw Tech's theoretical physics professor Jerzy Plebański,[3] he continued graduate work in Leopold Infeld's group at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of University of Warsaw.
[4] In 1961, Trautman and his colleague Róża Michalska spent a few months at Syracuse University, at the invitation of Peter G. Bergmann.
Trautman and Ivor Robinson discovered a family of exact solutions of the Einstein field equation, the Robinson-Trautman gravitational waves.