[4] Hans Adolf Buchdahl was born in Mainz, Germany, in a Jewish family (he used the spelling Adolph to dissociate himself from Hitler).
When World War II began, the UK government, unable to determine individual allegiance, interned German nationals including many Jewish refugees already fully assimilated.
[2] Once his mathematical abilities had been recognised there, he was released on a guarantor program and was transferred to the Physics Department of the University of Tasmania in Hobart.
From 1963 he was professor and head of the Department of Theoretical Physics in the Faculty of Science at the Australian National University in Canberra until his retirement in 1984–1985.
Buchdahl's attempt at making the foundations of thermodynamics more concise was far from advertising the use of the axiomatic method; instead it was an endeavour allowing "physical intuition to take precedence over mathematical niceties".
[1] Buchdahl's interest in tensor and spinor analysis was related to dealing with formalisms and calculational procedures, be it spherical and spheroidal harmonics.
[12] When Einstein was still alive, as with many other theorists[clarification needed] Hans Buchdahl could not escape the lure of the famous scientist's "unified field theory" of gravitation and electricity.
However, as Buchdahl's papers in this field show, he was attracted by the enlarged constructive possibilities of the more general geometries, not by any hoped-for physics behind the theory.