Valentine Bargmann

Valentine Bargmann (April 6, 1908 – July 20, 1989)[1] was a German born American mathematician and physicist.

Born in Berlin, Germany, Bargmann studied there 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 he worked as an assistant to Albert Einstein.

He found the irreducible unitary representations of SL2(R) and the Lorentz group (1947).[2][3]

Bargmann was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1968.[4] 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.

He died in Princeton in 1989.

References

  1. ^ "Valentine Bargmann". Biographical Memoirs, Vol. 76. National Academy Press. 1999. pp. 37–50. ISBN 0-309-06434-1. http://books.google.com/books?isbn=0309064341. 
  2. ^ V. Bargmann Irreducible Unitary Representations of the Lorentz Group The Annals of Mathematics 2nd Ser., Vol. 48, No. 3 (Jul., 1947), pp. 568-640
  3. ^ Bargmann, V.; Wigner, E. P. (1948). "Group theoretical discussion of relativistic wave equations". Proc. Natl. Sci. U. S. A. 34 (5): 211–23. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/citation/34/5/211. 
  4. ^ "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter B". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. http://www.amacad.org/publications/BookofMembers/ChapterB.pdf. Retrieved May 17, 2011. 

External links