Res Jost

Res Jost (10 January 1918 – 3 October 1990) was a Swiss theoretical physicist, who worked mainly in constructive quantum field theory.

Jost studied in Berne and at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH Zurich), where in 1946 he with thesis adviser Gregor Wentzel attained a doctorate ("Zur Ladungsabhängigkeit der Kernkräfte in der Vektormesontheorie ohne neutrale Mesonen“). Jost went then a half year to Niels Bohr to Copenhagen, where he introduced the "Jost function" into scattering theory. Afterwards he was in Zurich an assistant of Wolfgang Pauli. From 1949 to 1955, in 1957, 1962/3 and 1968 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he worked with Walter Kohn, Joaquin Mazdak Luttinger and Abraham Pais among others. He was since 1955 an extraordinary professor for theoretical physics at the ETH and starting from 1959 professor. Jost created 1965 together with Rudolf Haag the journal "Communications in Mathematical Physics “.

Jost established at the ETH a school of mathematical physics. Among his graduate students were Sergio Albeverio (b. 1939), Klaus Hepp (b. 1936), Konrad Osterwalder, David Ruelle, Robert Schrader, Eduard Zehnder, Rudolf Seiler, Martin Kummer.

Jost researched quantum-mechanical scattering theory (also inverse scattering theory: Reconstruction of potentials from scattering data) and the mathematical quantum field theory, where he in 1958 with the methods of Arthur Strong Wightman proved the PCT theorem and in 1957 introduced the Jost - Lehmann - Dyson - representation(an integral representation of the expectancy value of the commutator of two field operators). Jost was corresponding member Austrian Academy of Sciences and United States National Academy of Sciences. He received in 1984 the Max Planck medal.

Jost was married since 1949 to the Viennese physicist Hilde Fleischer. One of Jost's leisure activities was mushroom growing.

• Jost: The general theory of quantized fields, AMS, 1965
• Jost: Das Märchen vom Elfenbeinernen Turm. Reden und Aufsätze, Springer 1995 (Herausgegeben von Klaus Hepp, u.a. über Physikgeschichte bei Planck, Einstein, Faraday, Dirac, Mach, mit biographischer Note von Abraham Pais und Autobiographischem von Jost), ISBN 3-540-59476-0