To that end, it encourages communication between relativity researchers, in particular by organizing the triennial international GR conferences, sponsoring the Hyperspace website, and publishing the journal General Relativity and Gravitation.
The society also serves as the Affiliated Commission 2 (AC.2) of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics.
In the past, the office has been held by Christian Møller (1971–74), Nathan Rosen (1974–77), Peter Bergmann (1977–80), Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat (1980–83), Dennis Sciama (1983–86), Ezra Ted Newman (1986–89), George Ellis (1989–92), Roger Penrose (1992–95), Jürgen Ehlers (1995–98), Werner Israel (1998–2001), Robert Wald (2001–04), Clifford Will (2004–07), Abhay Ashtekar (2007–10), Malcolm A. H. MacCallum (2010–13), Gary Horowitz (2013–16) and Eric Poisson (2016–19), Nills Andersson (2019- 2022).
One is the Bergmann-Wheeler prize for an outstanding PhD thesis in the broad area of quantum gravity.
The other is the Jürgen Ehlers prize for an outstanding PhD thesis in numerical or mathematical relativity.