Valentine "Valya" Bargmann (April 6, 1908 – July 20, 1989) was a German-American

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

and theoretical

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate caus ...

Biography

Born in Berlin,

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

, to a

German Jewish The history of the Jews in Germany goes back at least to the year 321, and continued through the Early Middle Ages (5th to 10th centuries CE) and High Middle Ages (''circa'' 1000–1299 CE) when Jewish immigrants founded the Ashkenazi Jewish ...

family, Bargmann studied there from 1925 to 1933. After the National Socialist

Machtergreifung Adolf Hitler's rise to power began in the newly established Weimar Republic in September 1919 when Hitler joined the '' Deutsche Arbeiterpartei'' (DAP; German Workers' Party). He rose to a place of prominence in the early years of the party. Be ...

, he moved to Switzerland to the

University of Zürich The University of Zürich (UZH, german: Universität Zürich) is a public research university located in the city of Zürich, Switzerland. It is the largest university in Switzerland, with its 28,000 enrolled students. It was founded in 1833 f ...

where he received his Ph.D. under

Gregor Wentzel Gregor Wentzel (17 February 1898 – 12 August 1978) was a German physicist known for development of quantum mechanics. Wentzel, Hendrik Kramers, and Léon Brillouin developed the Wentzel–Kramers–Brillouin approximation in 1926. In his early y ...

. 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 The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholar ...

Princeton Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ni ...

(1937–46) he worked as an assistant to

Albert Einstein Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory ...

, publishing with him and

Peter Bergmann Peter Gabriel Bergmann (24 March 1915 – 19 October 2002) was a German-American physicist best known for his work with Albert Einstein on a unified field theory encompassing all physical interactions. He also introduced primary and secondar ...

on classical five-dimensional Kaluza–Klein theory (1941). He taught at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

since 1946, to the rest of his career. He pioneered understanding of the irreducible unitary representations of SL₂(R) and the

Lorentz group In physics and mathematics, the Lorentz group is the group of all Lorentz transformations of Minkowski spacetime, the classical and quantum setting for all (non-gravitational) physical phenomena. The Lorentz group is named for the Dutch physicis ...

(1947). He further formulated the Bargmann–Wigner equations with

Eugene Wigner Eugene Paul "E. P." Wigner ( hu, Wigner Jenő Pál, ; November 17, 1902 – January 1, 1995) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who also contributed to mathematical physics. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "for his con ...

(1948), for particles of arbitrary spin, building up on work of several theorists who pioneered

quantum mechanics Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, ...

. Bargmann's theorem (1954) on projective unitary representations of Lie groups gives a condition for when a projective unitary representation of a Lie group comes from an ordinary unitary representation of its universal cover. Bargmann further discovered the

Bargmann–Michel–Telegdi equation In physics, Larmor precession (named after Joseph Larmor) is the precession of the magnetic moment of an object about an external magnetic field. The phenomenon is conceptually similar to the precession of a tilted classical gyroscope in an exte ...

(1959) describing relativistic precession; Bargmann's limit of the maximum number of QM bound states of a potential (1952); the notion of Bargmann potentialsV. Bargmann (1949). "On the Connection between Phase Shifts and Scattering Potential", Reviews of Modern Physics, 21(3), 488–493. doi:10.1103/revmodphys.21.488 for the radial Schrödinger equations with bound states but no non-trivial scattering, which play a basic rôle in the theory of

Soliton In mathematics and physics, a soliton or solitary wave is a self-reinforcing wave packet that maintains its shape while it propagates at a constant velocity. Solitons are caused by a cancellation of nonlinear and dispersive effects in the medium ...

s, and the holomorphic representation in the

Segal–Bargmann space In mathematics, the Segal–Bargmann space (for Irving Segal and Valentine Bargmann), also known as the Bargmann space or Bargmann–Fock space, is the space of holomorphic functions ''F'' in ''n'' complex variables satisfying the square-integrab ...

(1961), including the Bargmann kernel. Bargmann was elected a Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

in 1968. In 1978, he received the

Wigner Medal The International Colloquium on Group Theoretical Methods in Physics is an academic conference devoted to applications of group theory to physics. It was founded in 1972 by Henri Bacry and Aloysio Janner. It hosts a colloquium every two years. Th ...

, together with Wigner himself, in the founding year of the prize. In 1979, Bargmann was elected to the US

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

. In 1988, he received the

Max Planck Medal The Max Planck medal is the highest award of the German Physical Society , the world's largest organization of physicists, for extraordinary achievements in theoretical physics. The prize has been awarded annually since 1929, with few exceptions, ...

of the

German Physical Society The German Physical Society (German: , DPG) is the oldest organisation of physicists. The DPG's worldwide membership is cited as 60,547, as of 2019, making it the largest physics society in the world. It holds an annual conference () and multiple ...

. He was also a talented pianist. He died in

in 1989.

References

External links

National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir
by J R Klauder

* * ttp://digilib.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/digitallibrary/servlet/Scaler?dw=425&dh=600&fn=permanent/einstein_exhibition/images/bargmann1& Photo from a website

Selected bibliography

*1934: "Über den Zusammenhang zwischen Semivektoren and Spinoren und die Reduktion der Diracgleichung für Semivektoren". ''Helv. Phys. Acta'' 7:57-82. *1936: "Zur Theorie des Wasserstoffatoms". ''Z. Phys.'' 99:576-82. *1937: "Über die durch Elektronenstrahlen in Kristallen angeregte Lichtemission". ''Helv. Phys. Acta'' 10:361-86. *1941: With A. Einstein and P. G. Bergmann. "On the five-dimensional representation of gravitation and electricity". In ''Theodore von Kármán Anniversary Volume'', pp. 212–25,(Pasadena, California Institute of Technology). *1944: With A. Einstein. "Bivector fields". ''Ann. Math.'' 45:1-14. *1945: "On the glancing reflection of shock waves". ''Applied Mathematics Panel Report No. 108'' *1946: With D. Montgomery and J. von Neumann. "Solution of linear systems of high order". Report to the Bureau of Ordinance, U. S. Navy. *1947: "Irreducible unitary representations of the Lorentz group". ''Ann. Math.'' 48:568-640. *1948: With E. P. Wigner. "Group theoretical discussion of relativistic wave equations". ''Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.'' 34:211-23. *1949: "Remarks on the determination of a central field of force from the elastic scattering phase shifts". ''Phys. Rev.'' 75:301-303. * "On the connection between phase shifts and scattering potential". ''Rev. Mod. Phys.'' 21:488-93. *1952: "On the number of bound states in a central field of force". ''Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.'' 38:961-66. *1954: "On unitary ray representations of continuous groups". ''Ann. Math.'' 59:1-46. *1959: With L. Michel and V. Telegdi. "Precession of the polarization of particles moving in a homogeneous electromagnetic field". ''Phys. Rev. Lett.'' 2:435-36. *1960: "Relativity". In ''Theoretical Physics in the Twentieth Century (Pauli Memorial Volume)'', eds., M. Fierz and V. F. Weisskopf, pp. 187–98. New York: Interscience Publishers. * With M. Moshinsky. "Group theory of harmonic oscillators. I. The collective modes". ''Nucl. Phys.'' 18:697-712. *1961: With M. Moshinsky. "Group theory of harmonic oscillators. II. The integrals of motion for the quadrupole-quadrupole interaction". ''Nucl. Phys.'' 23:177-99. * "On a Hilbert space of analytic functions and an associated integral transform. Part I." ''Commun. Pure Appl. Math.'' 14:187-214. *1962: "On the representations of the rotation group". ''Rev. Mod. Phys.'' 34:829-45. *1964: "Note on Wigner’s theorem on symmetry operations". ''J. Math. Phys.'' 5:862-68. *1967: "On a Hilbert space of analytic functions and an associated integral transform. Part II. A family of related function spaces application to distribution theory". ''Commun. Pure Appl. Math.'' 20:1-101. *1971: With P. Butera, L. Girardello, and J. R. Klauder. "On the completeness of the coherent states". ''Rep. Math. Phys.'' 2:221-28. *1972: "Notes on some integral inequalities". ''Helv. Phys. Acta'' 45:249-57. *1977: With I. T. Todorov. "Spaces of analytic functions on a complex cone as carriers for the symmetric tensor representations of SO(n)". ''J. Math. Phys.'' 18:1141-48. *1979: "Erinnerungen eines Assistanten Einsteins". Vierteljahrsschrift der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Zürich, Jahrgang 124, Heft 1, pp. 39–44. Zürich: Druck und Verlag Orell Fussli Graphische Betriebe AG. {{DEFAULTSORT:Bargmann, Valentine 1908 births 1989 deaths 20th-century American mathematicians 20th-century German mathematicians 20th-century American physicists Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences 20th-century German physicists Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United States Institute for Advanced Study visiting scholars Mathematical physicists University of Zurich alumni Jewish physicists Winners of the Max Planck Medal