Ernst Specker

Ernst Specker, 1982

Ernst Paul Specker (born February 11, 1920 in Zurich ; † December 10, 2011 there ) was a Swiss mathematician .

Life

Specker, born in 1920, grew up in Zurich and Davos , where he underwent sanatorium treatment for tuberculosis (which led to a permanent disability) in his youth and where his grandmother lived. From 1940 he studied mathematics at the ETH Zurich with Michel Plancherel , Ferdinand Gonseth , Heinz Hopf , W. Saxer, Paul Bernays and Beno Eckmann and Paul Finsler at the University of Zurich. He graduated from Hopf with a topic from topology and was an assistant at the ETH from 1945. In 1948 he received his doctorate there, also on topology. In 1949/50 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton , where he heard from Carl Ludwig Siegel and Alonzo Church and met Kurt Gödel . In 1951, after his habilitation, he became a private lecturer at the ETH and in 1955 a professor . He taught at the ETH from 1955 to 1987.

Specker was particularly concerned with mathematical logic and axiomatic set theory . In 1967 he published an important theorem of quantum mechanics with Simon Bernard Boiling , the so-called Boiling-Specker theorem , which proves the impossibility of a non-contextual model with hidden variables of quantum mechanics.

He had been married since 1956 and had three children.

Specker also published a volume of short sermons, given from 1993 to 1995 in the Predigerkirche Zurich ("Like a thief in the night").

The first cohomology group of overlays and homotopy properties of three-dimensional manifolds , Zurich: Art. Inst. Orell Füssli, 1949 ( dissertation )
The axiom of choice in Quine's New Foundations for mathematical logic , in: Journal of Symbolic Logic Vol. 14 (1949), pp. 145-158
Selecta , Birkhäuser, Basel, Berlin, 1990
The development of axiomatic set theory , annual report DMV (German Mathematicians Association), Vol. 81, 1978, pp. 13-21
Der Winkel , Teamart, Zurich, 2006
Like a thief in the night , TVZ, Zurich, 2008