Name Valentine Bargmann Role Mathematician | Education University of Zurich Awards Max Planck Medal | |
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Died July 20, 1989, Princeton, New Jersey, United States | ||
Valentine "Valya" Bargmann (April 6, 1908 – July 20, 1989) was a German-American mathematician and theoretical physicist.
Biography
Born in Berlin, Germany, Bargmann studied there from 1925 to 1933. After the National Socialist Machtergreifung, he moved to Switzerland to the University of Zürich where he received his Ph.D. under Gregor Wentzel.
He emigrated to the U.S., barely managing immigration acceptance as his German passport was to be revoked—with only two days of validity left.
At the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1937–46) he worked as an assistant to Albert Einstein, publishing with him and Peter Bergmann on classical five-dimensional Kaluza-Klein theory (1941). He taught at Princeton University since 1946, to the rest of his career.
He pioneered understanding of the irreducible unitary representations of SL2(R) and the Lorentz group (1947). He further formulated the Bargmann–Wigner equations with Eugene Wigner (1948), for particles of arbitrary spin, building up on work of several theorists who pioneered quantum mechanics.
He further discovered the Bargmann–Michel–Telegdi equation (1959) describing relativistic precession; Bargmann's limit of the maximum number of QM bound states of a potential (1952); and, influentially, the holomorphic representation in the Segal–Bargmann space (1961), including the celebrated Bargmann kernel.
Bargmann was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1968. In 1978 he received The Wigner Medal, together with Wigner himself, in the founding year of the prize. In 1988 he received the Max Planck medal of the German Physical Society.
He was also a talented pianist.
He died in Princeton in 1989.