Gian Carlo Wick

Gian Carlo Wick (1909 to 1992) was an Italian theoretical physicist, born in Turin, who made lasting contributions to quantum field theory. After a doctorate in Turin in 1930 he worked with Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig, became Enrico Fermi's assistant in Rome in 1932, and held chairs in Palermo, Padua and Rome. In 1946 he followed Fermi to the United States, where he was dismissed from Berkeley for refusing a loyalty oath, then worked at Carnegie Institute of Technology, the Institute for Advanced Study and CERN, led the theory department at Brookhaven National Laboratory and became a professor at Columbia University. He is remembered for Wick's theorem of 1950, the Wick rotation and the Wick contraction, and for helicity methods for collisions of particles with spin.