Martin Gutzwiller

Martin C. Gutzwiller ( born October 12, 1925 in Basel ) is a Swiss theoretical physicist.

Life and work

Gutzwiller attended schools in Heidelberg, St. Gallen, Trogen and until 1944 in Fribourg, where he also studied a year before he moved to Zurich at the ETH. At Wolfgang Pauli and Felix Villars he completed his dissertation at about the magnetic moment of the nucleus in the vector - meson theory, and completed his studies in 1950. Then he worked for a year for Brown, Boveri & Cie. and went to Kansas State University where he earned his doctorate at the Max Dresden 1953. His dissertation was entitled Quantum Theory of Wave Fields in Spaces of Constant Curvature negatives. After that he worked among others on geophysical area for Shell and 1960-1963 for IBM in Switzerland and then in the " Thomas J. Watson Research Center" in Yorktown Heights, New York. In 1993, he went there to retire. He taught, inter alia, at Columbia University, the ETH, the University of Paris - Orsay and in Stockholm.

Since 1993 he has been Adjunct Professor of Physics at Yale University.

Gutzwiller is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA and a member of the American Physical Society since 1992. In 1993 he received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics and 2003, the Max Planck Medal (especially for his work in solid-state theory ), 1995 an honorary doctorate from the University of Lausanne and in 2000, the University of Fribourg.

In 1963 he led independently by John Hubbard and Kanamori a Junjiro a simple model that describes interacting electrons in the crystal lattice. Later this Hubbard model was called. A variation approach to the many-body wave function of the electron, which was particularly successful in transition metals is known as Gutzwiller approximation.

Gutzwiller is known primarily for his trace formula of 1971, with the density of states of chaotic quantum systems can be obtained in the semi- classical limit of a sum over the classical periodic orbits of the system.

Gutzwiller also dealt with celestial mechanics and sat at the IBM Ephemeridenrechnungen to the Moon, which began Wallace John Eckert.