Pascual Jordan

Pascual Jordan (1902 to 1980) was a German theoretical and mathematical physicist, born in Hannover, who co-founded quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. After studying at Hannover and Göttingen, where he assisted Richard Courant and worked under Max Born, he coauthored with Born and Werner Heisenberg the founding papers on matrix mechanics and developed the canonical anticommutation relations for fermions. He introduced what are now called Jordan algebras, a class of nonassociative algebras devised to formalise the algebra of observables in quantum theory; they were not useful for that purpose but have found many applications in projective geometry, number theory, complex analysis and optimization. His career is also marked by his membership of the Nazi Party from 1933, his seat in the Bundestag for the Christian Democratic Union from 1957 to 1961, and his unorthodox theory that the Earth has expanded.