Gerhart Lüders

Gerhart Lüders was a German theoretical physicist who lived from 1920 to 1995 and worked mainly on quantum field theory. Born in Hamburg, he took his physics doctorate at the University of Hamburg in 1950 and his habilitation at the University of Göttingen in 1954, the year in which he proved the CPT theorem in its form that parity invariance implies invariance under combined charge conjugation and time reversal. The result is also known as the Pauli-Lüders theorem and is one of the most fundamental rules of particle physics. With Bruno Zumino he gave a rigorous proof of the spin-statistics theorem in 1958, and he studied the quantum mechanical measurement process, whose rule now carries his name, as well as superconductivity. He led a group at the Max Planck Institute for physics in Munich from 1957 to 1960 and was professor in Göttingen from 1960 until his retirement in 1982. He received the Max Planck Medal in 1966.