Markus Fierz
Markus Eduard Fierz ( born June 20, 1912 in Basel, † 20 June, 2006 Küsnacht ) was a Swiss theoretical physicist who worked mainly on quantum field theory.
The father of Fierz was a chemist at Geigy and later a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich ). Fierz attended the grammar school in Zurich. From 1931 he began his studies in Göttingen, where he among other things, heard at Hermann Weyl, and went again in 1933 at the ETH, where he studied physics with Wolfgang Pauli and Gregor Wentzel and 1936 doctorate at Wentzel, where he discovered the infrared problem in quantum electrodynamics in his doctoral thesis. After that he went to Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig ( where he a conference with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen attended by Heisenberg ) and in 1936 assistant to Wolfgang Pauli in Zurich ( Heisenberg had recommended him ). In his habilitation in 1939, he treated relativistic fields arbitrary spins ( with and without mass) and proved the spin-statistics theorem for free fields. In 1940 he was appointed Privatdozent in Basel in 1943 and an assistant professor. From 1944 to 1959 he was Professor of Theoretical Physics in Basel. Winter 1950/51 he was at Princeton, where he met Res Jost at the Institute for Advanced Study. 1959/1960 he was head of the theory division at CERN in Geneva for a year and in 1960 succeeded his teacher as professor Pauli at the ETH. In 1977 he retired there. Fierz also worked on gravitational theory, but published only a part.
Fierz also dealt with the history of science, especially Isaac Newton. He was, in the words of Charles Enz among all physicists familiar interlocutor of Wolfgang Pauli.
In 1979 he received the Max Planck Medal. In 1989 he received the Albert Einstein Medal.
Since 1940, he was married to Menga beaver, which he making music (he played violin) met. He had two sons with her.
His twin brother Heinrich Karl Fierz was a famous psychiatrist (as well as his mother, Linda, was born David, who also belonged to the school of Carl Gustav Jung).