Valentine Bargmann

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Valentine Bargmann (April 6, 1908 in Berlin, Germany – July 20, 1989) was a mathematician and physicist. Bargamnn studied at Berlin from 1925 to 1933. After the 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.

At the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton University he worked as an assistant to Albert Einstein.

He found the irreducible unitary representations of SL₂(R) and the Lorentz group (1947).

In 1978 he received the 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.

[edit] References

• V. Bargmann Irreducible Unitary Representations of the Lorentz Group The Annals of Mathematics 2nd Ser., Vol. 48, No. 3 (Jul., 1947), pp. 568-640
• National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoirs
• The Princeton Mathematics Community in the 1930s, interview of Valentine Bargmann at Princeton University on 12 April 1984