I met first Paul more than 30 years ago, having the need for my research, on thermodynamic properties of condensed gases, to have directions about the possibility to get sound mass spectrometer measurements. Since then, I had many occasions to meet him within IUPAC activities and by correspondence, and we both realized that we had a quite similar type of personal character, very resilient in respects to our respective positions (often quite similar) in several scientific respects. One example in that sense was one of the last of his papers, which we liked to share (F. Pavese, P. De Bièvre, Fostering diversity of thought in measurement, 2015, in ISBN 978-981-4678-61-2, Ref. 5 in Pavese contribution). We became good friends also personally.

I have rarely met another people with so wide a range of interests and high level of competence, demonstrated by the wide range of his activities, and of formal positions that he performed with excellence until his very last days (I will not repeat here the excellent Obituary written by Hendrik Emons in 2016 on ACQUAL). In particular, he was an excellent metrologist, in the frame of his own research and of the research in metrology worldwide, and an important and competent contributor to one of the basic metrological documents, the International Vocabulary of Metrology.

We will remember for a long time the contributions of Paul de Bièvre to science and to metrology, not only in Chemistry, and of a very special Person.

Dr. Franco Pavese, former Research Director in Metrology (Thermodynamics), National Research Council of Italy;

IMEKO, Technical Committee TC21 “Mathematical Tools for Measurement”, Chair.