Paul Chernoff

Paul Robert Chernoff (21 June 1942, Philadelphia – 17 January 2017)[1] was an American mathematician, specializing in functional analysis and the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics.[2] He is known for Chernoff's Theorem, a mathematical result in the Feynman path integral formulation of quantum mechanics.[3]

Paul Chernoff

Education and career

Chernoff graduated from Central High School in Philadelphia. He matriculated at Harvard University, where he received bachelor's degree summa cum laude in 1963, master's degree in 1965, and Ph.D. in 1968 under George Mackey with thesis Semigroup Product Formulas and Addition of Unbounded Operators.[4]

At the University of California, Berkeley he became in 1969 a lecturer, in 1971 an assistant professor, and in 1980 a full professor. U. C. Berkeley awarded him multiple Distinguished Teaching Awards and the Lili Fabilli and Eric Hoffer Essay Prize.[2] In 1986 he was a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Chernoff was elected in 1984 a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science[5] and in 2012 a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

He gave in 1981 a simplified proof of the Groenewold-Van Hove theorem,[6][7][8] which is a no-go theorem that relates classical mechanics to quantum mechanics.[2]

Selected publications

References

  1. biographical information from American Men and Women of Science, Thomson Gale 2004
  2. "Obituary. Paul Chernoff". San Francisco Chronicle. 2 April 2017.
  3. Butko, Yana A. (2015). "Chernoff approximation of subordinate semigroups and applications". Stochastics and Dynamics. 18 (3): 1850021. arXiv:1512.05258. doi:10.1142/S0219493718500211.
  4. Paul Robert Chernoff at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  5. "American Association for the Advancement of Science Elects University Members". University of California Bulletin, week of August 6–10, 1984. 33 (3). p. 12.
  6. Chernoff, Mathematical obstructions to quantization, Hadronic J., vol. 4, 1981, pp. 879–898
  7. Sternberg, Shlomo; Guillemin, Victor (1990). Symplectic Techniques in Physics. Cambridge University Press. pp. 101–102. ISBN 9780521389907.
  8. Berndt, Rolf (1998). Einführung in die Symplektische Geometrie. Vieweg. pp. 119–120. ISBN 9783322802156.
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