Res Jost

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Res Jost, Copenhagen 1963

Res Jost (born January 10, 1918 in Bern ; † October 3, 1990 in Zurich ) was a Swiss theoretical physicist who mainly worked on constructive quantum field theory .

life and work

Jost studied in Bern and at the University of Zurich , where he received his doctorate in 1946 under Gregor Wentzel ("On the charge dependence of nuclear forces in vector meson theory without neutral mesons"). Jost then went to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen for six months , where he introduced the Jost function named after him in a thesis on scattering theory . Then he was assistant to Wolfgang Pauli in Zurich . 1949 to 1955 (initially with Pauli and then extended at the personal invitation of Robert Oppenheimer ), 1957, 1962/3 and 1968 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton , where he a. a. WithWalter Kohn , Joaquin Mazdak Luttinger and Abraham Pais worked together. From 1955 he was associate professor for theoretical physics at the ETH and from 1959 professor. In 1965, Jost founded the journal Communications in Mathematical Physics together with Rudolf Haag .

Jost established a school of mathematical physics at the ETH. His doctoral students included a. Sergio Albeverio , Klaus Hepp , Konrad Osterwalder , David Ruelle , Robert Schrader , Eduard Zehnder , Ruedi Seiler (Rudolf Seiler), Martin Kummer .

Jost researched the quantum mechanical scattering theory (also inverse scattering theory: reconstruction of potentials from scattering phases) and the mathematical quantum field theory, where in 1958 he proved the PCT theorem with the methods of Arthur Strong Wightman and in 1957 the Jost- Lehmann - Dyson representation (an integral - Representation of the expected value of the commutator of two field operators).

Jost was a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and, since 1976, of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. In 1984 he received the Max Planck Medal of the German Physical Society and an honorary doctorate from the University of Bern .

Jost was married to the Viennese physicist Hilde Fleischer (* 1922) since 1949. One of Jost's leisure activities was mushroom growing. He was only closely connected with Pauli for the time being, who initially had an almost fatherly relationship with him (they spoke on two terms). The relationship began to cool off in 1957/58 when both were planning stays at the Institute for Advanced Study at the same time, which was not possible from an organizational point of view as they were colleagues in Zurich and had to coordinate their teaching duties. The break occurred in the last year and a half of Pauli's life. This was one of the reasons why Wolfgang Pauli's estate did not go to ETH, but to CERN.

Fonts (selection)

author

Essays
Books
  • The general theory of quantized fields (Lectures in applied mathematics; 4). AMS, Providence, RI. 1965.
  • Klaus Hepp u. a. (Ed.): The fairy tale of the Ivory Tower. Speeches and essays (lecture notes in physics; 34). Springer 1995, ISBN 3-540-59476-0 .
  • Quantum mechanics . Association of mathematicians and physicists at the ETH, Zurich 1969/71 (2 vols.).

editor

  • Local quantum theory (ITS Proceedings; 45). Academic Press, New York 1969.

literature

Web links

swell

  1. ↑ Res Jost, Harry Lehmann : integral representation of causal commutators . In: Il Nuovo Cimento , Vol. 5 (1957), p. 1598; expanded by Freeman Dyson , in: Physical Review , Vol. 110 (1958), p. 1960, ISSN  0031-9007
  2. ^ Charles Enz : No time to be brief. A scientific biography of Wolfgang Pauli . OUP, Oxford 2002, p. 439, ISBN 0-19-856479-1
  3. ^ Charles Enz No time to be brief , pp. 513f.
  4. ↑ Charles Enz: "Pauli said". Biography of the Nobel Prize winner Wolfgang Paul ("No time to be brief. A scientific biography of Wolfgang Pauli"). Verlag neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zurich 2005, p. 536, ISBN 3-03823-144-4 (The break with Jost also had an impact on Pauli's widow (Franca), who initially announced her intention to donate the ETH estate ).
  5. ↑ Zugl. Dissertation, University of Zurich 1946.
  6. ↑ Contents: About the history of physics with Max Planck , Albert Einstein , Michael Faraday , Paul Dirac and Ernst Mach , with a biographical note by Abraham Pais and an autobiographical note by Jost.
  7. ↑ Wightman on Jost and Jost on Wightman.
personal data
SURNAME Jost, Res
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss theoretical physicist
DATE OF BIRTH January 10, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Bern
DATE OF DEATH 3rd October 1990
Place of death Zurich