Markus Fierz

Markus Eduard Fierz (20 June 1912 to 20 June 2006) was a Swiss physicist, remembered particularly for formulating the spin-statistics theorem and for his contributions to quantum theory, particle physics and statistical mechanics. He was awarded the Max Planck Medal in 1979 and the Albert Einstein Medal in 1989. His father, Hans Eduard Fierz, was a chemist with Geigy and later a professor at ETH Zurich. Fierz began his studies in Göttingen in 1931, returned to Zurich in 1933 to study physics at ETH under Wolfgang Pauli and Gregor Wentzel, and earned his doctorate in 1936 with a thesis on the infrared catastrophe in quantum electrodynamics. He became Pauli's assistant, and in 1939 his habilitation thesis on relativistic fields of arbitrary spin proved the spin-statistics theorem for free fields. He was professor of theoretical physics in Basel from 1944 to 1959, led the theoretical physics department at CERN for a year, and in 1960 succeeded Pauli at ETH, where he retired in 1977.