Ernst Specker

Paul Ernst Specker ( born February 11, 1920 in Zurich, † December 10, 2011 ) was a Swiss mathematician.

Life

Specker, born in 1920, grew up in Zurich and Davos, where he for tuberculosis ( which led to a permanent disability ) in his youth a sanatorium treatment underwent and where his grandmother lived. He studied from 1940 Mathematics at the ETH Zurich among others, Michel Plancherel, Ferdinand Gonseth, Heinz Hopf, W. Saxer, Paul Bernays and Beno Eckmann and Paul Finsler at the University of Zurich. He put in Hopf his diploma with a theme from the topology from and was from 1945 assistant at the ETH. In 1948 he completed his doctorate there, also on topology. 1949/50, he was at Princeton, where he heard, among others, Carl Ludwig Siegel and Alonzo Church and Kurt Godel met at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1951 he was a lecturer at the ETH and 1955 Professor after his habilitation. He taught from 1955 to 1987 at the ETH.

Specker has been dealing with mathematical logic and axiomatic set theory. In 1967 he published with Simon Bernard cooking an important theorem of quantum mechanics, called the boil - Specker theorem, which proves the impossibility of non-contextual model with hidden variables in quantum mechanics.

He was married in 1956 and had three children.

Specker also published a volume of short sermons, held from 1993 to 1995 in the Predigerkirche Zurich ( " Like a thief in the night ").

Publications

  • The first cohomology group of overlays and three-dimensional manifolds Homotopieeigenschaften, Zurich: Art Institute Orell Füssli, 1949 (dissertation)
  • Selecta, Birkhäuser, Basel, Berlin, 1990
  • The development of axiomatic set theory, Annual Report DMV ( German mathematician club ), Bd.81, 1978, p.13 -21
  • The angle that type of team, Zurich, 2006
  • Like a thief in the night, TVZ, Zurich, 2008
Princeton (New Jersey) Set theory#Axiomatic set theory Simon B. Kochen Kochen–Specker theorem Integrated Authority File
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