|
Valentine Bargmann 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 and the Lorentz group. He also formulated the Bargmann-Wigner equations in 1948 with Eugene Wigner, based on the work of many theorists who pioneered quantum mechanics.
Bargmann was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1968. 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.
|
