Arthur Wightman

Arthur Strong Wightman, who lived from 30 March 1922 to 13 January 2013, was an American mathematical physicist and one of the founders of the axiomatic approach to quantum field theory, the originator of the Wightman axioms. He was born in Rochester, New York, took a bachelor's degree in physics at Yale in 1942 and a doctorate at Princeton in 1949 under John Wheeler. He taught at Princeton from the early 1950s and became the Thomas D. Jones Professor of Mathematical Physics in 1971, retiring as professor emeritus in 1992. In the 1950s he introduced his axioms as a mathematical foundation for relativistic quantum field theory, treating quantum fields as distributions in space-time. With John Tate he worked on representations of the Lorentz and Poincare groups, and with Lars Garding he studied representations of commutator and anti-commutator algebras. He received the 1969 Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics and the 1997 Henri Poincare Prize, and was an invited speaker at the 1962 International Congress of Mathematicians.