Walter Thirring

Walter Eduard Thirring (29 April 1927 – 19 August 2014) was an Austrian physicist after whom the Thirring model in quantum field theory is named.

He was the son of the physicist Hans Thirring.

Walter Thirring was born in Vienna, Austria, where he earned his Doctor of Physics degree in 1949 at the age of 22.

"High-energy physics was Walter’s earliest scientific interest. Important papers include the first rigorous proof of divergence of perturbation series in a quantum field theory and the discovery of an exactly soluble model in relativistic quantum field theory, known as the Thirring model. That 1958 work, not Sin-itiro Tomonaga’s paper as occasionally alleged, was the source for Joaquin Luttinger’s important model in condensed-matter physics and for ”bosonization.” Walter’s 1955 monograph on quantum electrodynamics was highly influential. Two remarkable papers he published in Nuclear Physics in 1959 and 1960 contain ideas pointing to the eightfold way and the theory of quarks developed later by Murray Gell-Mann and Yuval Ne’eman."

Besides pioneering work in quantum field theory, Walter Thirring devoted his scientific life to mathematical physics.

He is the author of one of the first textbooks on quantum electrodynamics as well as of a four-volume course in mathematical physics.

In 1959 he became a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Vienna, and from 1968 to 1971 he was head of the Theory Division and director at CERN.

In 2000, he received the Henri Poincaré Prize of the International Association of Mathematical Physics.

Walter Thirring authored Cosmic Impressions, Templeton Press, Philadelphia and London, in 2007, and in that book he sums up his feelings about the scientific discoveries made by modern cosmology: In the last decades, new worlds have been unveiled that our great teachers wouldn’t have even dreamed of.

The panorama of cosmic evolution now enables deep insights into the blueprint of creation… Human beings recognize the blueprints, and understand the language of the Creator… These realizations do not make science the enemy of religion, but glorify the book of Genesis in the Bible.

His memoirs were published in 2010 as The Joy of Discovery: Great Encounters Along the Way by World Scientific Publishing Company.

He recollects encounters with scientists like Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli and others as well as his collaborations with Murray Gell-Mann and Elliott Lieb.