Thirring's biographical Sketch

Walter Thirring was born on April 29th, 1927, in Vienna into a Protestant family originating from Thuringia (the family name Thüringer finally became Thirring). His ancestors came to Austria in 1623 as religious refugees during the times of the Thirty Years’ War and later settled in the small Hungarian town of Sopron. Hungary was then and later a safe haven for Protestants, since the Transleithanian part of the Habsburg empire did not submit to the cuius regio eius religio rule and the Counter Reformation. His grandfather Ludwig Julius Thirring (1858-1941) moved to Vienna in 1878 to study mathematics and physics. While being of Protestant denomination Walter attended the progressive, nonelitist and socially oriented Catholic “Neulandschule”. The adolescent boy was soon confronted with a radical change of society “which can be arbitrarily deformed in the hands of a demagogue”. A few days after the occupation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938 his father Hans Thirring (1888-1976) was dismissed from his academic post. The Gestapo was since then a frequent visitor of the Thirring’s flat. Following his grandfather Ludwig Julius who studied with Charles Hermite (1822-1901) in Paris and his father Hans, student of Boltzmann’s pupil Fritz Hasenöhrl (1874-1916) and since 1927 full professor of theoretical physics at the University of Vienna, it was now Walter’s turn to close the gap in the family’s chain of physicists. His brother Harald did not return from the World War II battle field. During the last days of World War II the Thirrings left Vienna for their second home at Kitzbühel not far from Innsbruck, where Walter began his studies with the theoretical physicist Arthur March (1891-1957) lacking a proper final exam (Matura). In 1949 he got his PhD from the University of Vienna with distinction. The topic of his thesis was the Dirac equation (“Zur kräftefreien Bewegung nach der Dirac-Gleichung”). Paul Urban (1905-1995), assistant at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Vienna, raised Thirrings interests in meson theory, at that time the talk of the town among physicists, by engaging him in boring perturbation theory calculations of various cross sections. When he asked if there were any experimental data available to check and verify his calculations he had to be disappointed by his tutor.

After having received his PhD Thirring was granted a scholarship at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, where he met Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961), a close friend of his father from the times of their studies with Fritz Hasenöhrl. The following year he spent as a Fellow at Glasgow University and during the academic year 1950/51 he held an assistantship at the Max-Planck-Institut in Göttingen, where he worked with Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976). Until his first position as a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Bern he was “on the road”: 1951/52 as UNESCO Fellow at the ETH Zürich, where he met the caustic Austrian Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958), 1952/53 assistant at the University of Bern. In 1953/54 he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and met Albert Einstein (1879-1955). In 1952 Thirring married Helga Georgiades. The couple has two sons, Klaus and Peter, and four grandchildren have since enlarged the family. In 1954 he returned to Europe as a lecturer at the University of Bern. The following years 1956/57 he was Visiting Professor at MIT and 1957/58 at the University of Washington in Seattle. During this time of academic tramping Thirring was intensively engaged with problems in quantum field theory, becoming one of its pioneers. Among his co-authors at that time were Stanley Deser, Marwin L. Goldberger and Murray Gell-Mann. Several papers on renormalization and dispersion relation in particle physics were the result of these fruitful co-operations. During this ten year period of work at different research centres Thirring made a pivotal experience, transnationality of science, an insight he brought back to his, at that time provincial, native Austria. After one year as full professor at the University of Bern in 1959 he accepted a call of the University of Vienna. Until his retirement in 1995 he was professor at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Vienna.

From an early stage onward, Thirring was engaged with the first steps of Austria’s membership of CERN which was finalized in 1959, opening doors for experimental and theoretical research on a truly international basis. Since the 1950’s Thirring concentrated his research mainly on theoretical elementary particle physics with some excursions into other fields of physics. When Marietta Blau (1894-1970), who pioneered the photographic method in particle physics, came back to Austria in 1960 after having left the country as a Hitler refugee in 1938 and years spent in Mexico and later in the US (Columbia University, Brookhaven, Florida), she and Thirring formed a group of young student researchers to analyse bubble chamber photographs from CERN. This initiative was a very first bridge between experimentalists at CERN and physicists in Vienna and thus the starting point of high energy physics in Austria. Subsequently, the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Austrian Academy of Sciences was founded by W. Kummer in 1966 and became the home base for Austria’s activities at CERN, actively supported by Thirring as long term chairman of the board of the Institute. In 1966 Thirring was made corresponding and in 1967 full member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Thirring’s close ties to high energy physics found a new stage when he became member of the Directorate of CERN as head of the Theoretical Department for the period 1968-1971, a time of important decisions to be made. The main tasks at that time were to get the intersecting storage ring ISR, based on a concept of the Austrian-born physicist Bruno Touschek (1921-1978), operational and to negotiate the siting of the next generation accelerator, the 300 GeV SPS, which had already been decided on in 1964 under the directorship of another Austrian-born physicist, V. F.Weisskopf (1908-2002). Thanks to the interventions of the then Director General of CERN, Bernard Greégory, the member states finally took the wise decision to build the SPS at Geneva, against strong lobbying of several countries to build the machine on a different site somewhere in Europe. Austria took part in this competition and made a site proposal for Göpfritz in the Waldviertel, a place surrounded by lovely woods and of perfect geological conditions some hundred kilometres north of Vienna!

Interestingly enough Thirring has written only occasionally on science policy or exposed his opinion on matters beyond pure science in public. On the occasion of the opening of the 10th Schladming Winter School for Nuclear Physics in 1971 Thirring addressed the audience with an analysis of the situation of high energy physics in Europe stressing the importance of fundamental science for the scientific development in Europe to counteract the influence of the leading powers, USA and the Soviet Union. Big science had become the characteristic of research in fields like particle physics, and Thirring stressed the fact that it is most important for small countries to participate in this activity. Thirring went one step further and called for new instruments for research in Europe: “The real problem of science in Europe seems to me to be how we shall be able to cope with these challenging fields which require large-scale collaboration. The individual countries are too small to deal effectively with these branches of science and it will be difficult to co-ordinate the intentions and desires of various countries and various scientific disciplines. Without something like a European Research Council which plans and supervises science as well as directs the spending of the research money on a European level, I can hardly see that we will get anywhere”.

It took quite some time until, in 2006, Thirring’s proposal became reality (albeit in a different form) with the foundation of the European Research Council within the framework of the European Community. The incisiveness of his intellect had seen a pressing need long before, but the realisation of his proposal needed a further step of unification and collaboration in Europe transgressing the political model of CERN.

Thirring started his academic career by and large as a theoretical elementary particle physicist. Interestingly enough by the mid 1960’s he shifted his style from traditional theoretical physics to a stronger mathematically oriented mode and this shift goes together with a shift of his research interests. As soon as 1967 he published in Communications in Mathematical Physics. His first encounter with Elliott Lieb happened during their stay at the ICTP in Trieste in 1968, and subsequently when Thirring invited Lieb to give a talk on joint work with J.L. Lebowitz on the existence and convexity properties of the thermodynamical functions of Coulomb systems. Thirring found that this result was so much part of the general physics culture that even particle physicists ought to know about it.

A period of intense collaboration on the improvement of the Dyson-Lenard proof of the stability of matter between Thirring and Lieb started in 1974 when Lieb was Schrödinger Guest Professor at Thirrings institute in Vienna. In the following summer Lieb again came to Vienna and this time they succeeded in directly proving the stability of matter. During the following years this topic and other problems of the Thomas-Fermi-Theory was further investigated by both, together with other collaborators.

During the years 1976 – 1978 Thirring served as first president of the International Association of Mathematical Physics (IAMP) and succeeded in developing this organisation into an international platform. Naturally, opinions are split which of Thirring’s achievements should be counted as the most important. He himself leans towards the work on the stability of matter. In trying to do justice to the enormous breath of his oeuvre an assessment is confronted with a wide range of subjects. Among his early work we find a paper in the field of applied statical mechanics, solving a problem in dentistry, next in his publication list to his important paper on a quantum field theoretical model of a self-interacting Dirac field which bears his name as a toy model stimulating research to this day. Work on gravitational theory is followed by a precursor of the quark model. The next paper we want to mention here briefly because Thirring frequently refers to it not only in his popular writings: in 1970 the scientific community received with considerable scepticism his claim, that under certain circumstances a system, e.g. our sunor a supernova, will exhibit negative specific heat, i.e. the seemingly paradoxical fact that a system when cooled gets hotter and cooler when heated. The later period of his work is marked by dealing with questions on the ergodicity of quantum systems and quantum chaos. An excellent overview of what he has achieved can be found in Thirring’s “Selecta” with contributions to Mathematical Physics, Statistical Physics, Quantum Field Theory, General Relativity, and Elementary Particle Physics. As an author of textbooks his influence extended far beyond the inner circle of students attending his lecture courses. Thirring published advanced introductions to quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory. His four volume textbook on mathematical physics (translated into English, Russian and Ukrainian), resulting from a four term lecture course during the 1970’s, is considered in Austrian, Russian and Ukrainian Universities as the standard textbook in the field, known at that time to his pupils as typed and mimeographed lecture notes, the green booklets (“grüne Hefte”). Thirring’s argument for the selection of the material presented in the textbooks is clear and brief, a trade mark of his somewhat terse style: “I decided to cover only those subjects in which one can work from the basic laws to derive physically relevant results with full mathematical rigour’. It follows, Thirring tells us succinctly, that relativistic quantum theory and other important branches of physics are not taken up because they ‘have not yet matured from the stage of rules for calculations to mathematically well understood disciplines”.

This statement, in a sense, sounds very much like an ex negativo formulation of Thirring’s research programme as a mathematical physicist. Thirring’s autonomy of choice of his research topics is one of the most astonishing observations to make regarding his scientific oeuvre. Till today he is working on the forefront of mathematical physics and at the same time he is a very independent observer of the scene. His view on physics is void of fashions. Is there — one may ask — a specific ‘philosophy’ guiding Thirring’s physical insight, his intuition and choice of subject? He never expressed himself on this delicate point of motivation of his scientific work. The central epistemological and methodological motor of his style of doing physics is based on a deep intuition concerning the physical relevance of a specific problem, combined with the aim of uncompromising mathematical rigour. Communication between scientists from both fields, physics and mathematics, and the use of the most recent mathematical tools are integral parts of this mode of operation and has manifested itself on an international scale at the Erwin Schrödinger Institute under Thirring’s initial directorship. The credo of Thirring — and of the ESI — is the following: the ultimate criterium for the validity of a physical argument lies in a rigorous mathematical proof based on clearly stated premises. This does not mean that a good deal of physical inspiration and a strong feeling for the right way to formulate a physical problem are not necessary conditions to find one’s feet in physics. Walter Thirring reputation as a scholar to the initiative by Austrian, Ukrainian and Russian physicists and mathematicians to found an institute dedicated to mathematical physics in Vienna. Without Thirring as an outstanding leader and scientist this dream would not have become reality. Since 1993 his spirit of weaving together the threads of physics and mathematics into one texture is manifesting itself in the Erwin Schrödinger Institute, perhaps Thirring’s most visible achievement as a scientific manager. There is a further aspect of the ESI which goes beyond its scientific work: as a meeting place for researchers not only from East and West of Europe but on the global scale it reflects aspirations and hopes of Walter’s father Hans Thirring to promote peace in this world.

In 1996 was founded the Walter Thirring Institute for Mathematical Physics, Astrophysics, and Nuclear Investigations in the Transcarpathian Region of Ukraine in 1998 was organized the Austro-Ukrainian Institute for Science and Technology by which were printed more than 60 books and organized about 20 International Conferences and Workshops on mathematical and theoretical physics.

Walter Thirring international cooperation with N. Bogolyubov Institute for Theoretical Physics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, in Kyiv, and with the respected Walter Thirring Institute for Mathematical Physics, Astrophysics, and Nuclear Investigations in the Transcarpathian Region of Ukraine had an effect clearly transgressing scientific policy: it helped to establish contacts of Ukrainian scientific institutions with Western European scientific institutions. This international cooperation in the frame of Bogolyubov-Petrov and Thirring-Kummer-Wess scientific schools have helped to guarantee a stimulating atmosphere which continues to attract the bright students which the community of physicists in Europe needs to accomplish its further scientific goals.