José Enrique Moyal (also known as Jo or Joe Moyal) (born 1 October 1910 in Jerusalem, then in the Ottoman Empire and soon to devolve to the Mandate for Palestine; died 22 May 1998 in Canberra, Australia) was a mathematical physicist who contributed to aeronautical engineering, electrical engineering and statistics, among other fields. He helped to establish the phase space formulation of quantum mechanics in 1949 by bringing together the ideas of Hermann Weyl, John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, and Hip Groenewold.
This formulation is statistical in nature and makes logical connections between quantum mechanics and classical statistical mechanics, enabling a natural comparison between the two formulations.
Weyl quantization is a synonym for "Moyal Quantization", or "Phase Space Quantization," and largely avoids use of operators for quantum mechanical observables prevalent in the canonical formulation. Quantum-mechanical evolution in phase space is specified by a Moyal bracket.
He was a professor of mathematics at Macquarie University and a colleague of John Clive Ward at the former School of Mathematics and Physics, having previously worked at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.
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