The role of A. Trautman, I. Robinson and associates in the renaissance period development of gravitational wave theory

In relation to the so-called renaissance movement in general relativity commencing in the mid-1950's we will discuss a series of papers published by Andrzej Trautman. He drew upon the slow motion approximation developed by his advisor Infeld, the general covariance based strong conservation laws enunciated by Bergmann and Goldberg, the Riemann tensor attributes explored by Goldberg and related geodesic deviation exploited by Pirani, the permissible metric discontinuities identified by Lichnerowicz, O'Brien and Synge, and finally Petrov's classification of vacuum spacetimes. With several significant additions he produced a comprehensive overview of the state of research in equations of motion and gravitational waves that was presented in a widely cited series of lectures at King's College, London, in 1958. Fundamental new contributions were the formulation of boundary conditions representing outgoing gravitational radiation, the deduction of its Petrov type, a covariant expression for null wave fronts, and a derivation of the mass loss formula due to radiation emission. This progress will be compared with the current acceptance of the quadrupole moment approach and the results of numerical integration techniques.