Josef-Maria Jauch

Josef Maria Jauch (September 20, 1914 in Lucerne – August 30, 1974 in Geneva) was a Swiss/American theoretical physicist.

He studied mathematics and physics at ETH Zürich, earning his diploma in 1938. He then received his doctorate in 1940 from the University of Minnesota under Edward Lee Hill, for a dissertation entitled On Contact Transformations and Group Theory in Quantum Mechanical Problems.

In the summer semester of 1940, he became an assistant to Wolfgang Pauli in Zurich. After Pauli’s departure for Princeton, Jauch continued working at the ETH in Zurich until 1942, when he also departed for the U.S.

From 1942 to 1946 he was an assistant professor at Princeton University. From 1946 to 1958 he was associate professor, and then full professor, at the University of Iowa. During that time he spent one year as a visiting scholar with the Fulbright Program at Trinity College, Cambridge (from 1950 to 1951).

In 1958 Jauch returned to Europe, where he spent one year working at CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva (from 1958 to 1959), followed by one year stationed in London as a scientific liaison officer for the U.S. Office of Naval Research (from 1959 to 1960).

In 1960 he accepted a professorship at the University of Geneva, where he became the director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics. He remained in that position until his death in 1974.

His work focused on particle diffusion theory, the process of measurement in quantum mechanics, causality, irreversible phenomena, and gauge theories. His contribution to the axiomatization of quantum field theory is a mathematical model of rigor. While in the U.S., he became interested in the theory of symmetry groups and their applications in the field of particle physics, a subject whose importance was not appreciated until the 1960s with the introduction of the SU(3) group by Murray Gell-Mann and Yuval Ne'eman.

Jauch was a founding member of the European Physical Society. Among his doctoral students were Gérard Emch, Constantin Piron and Kenneth Watson. He was the author of several books and numerous scientific papers.

He was married twice and had three children from his first marriage.

• The Theory of Photons and Electrons. The Relativistic Quantum Field Theory of Charged Particles with Spin One-half (with Fritz Rohrlich) (Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1955)
• Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1968)
• Are Quanta Real? A Galilean Dialogue (Indiana University Press, 1973)