Paul Chernoff

Paul Robert Chernoff (21 June 1942, Philadelphia – 17 January 2017) was an American mathematician, specializing in functional analysis and the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics. He is known for Chernoff's Theorem, a mathematical result in the Feynman path integral formulation of quantum mechanics. He was also the author of limericks.

Education and career Chernoff graduated from Central High School in Philadelphia. He matriculated at Harvard University, where he received bachelor's degree, summa cum laude, in 1963, master's degree in 1965, and Ph.D. in 1968 under George Mackey with thesis Semigroup Product Formulas and Addition of Unbounded Operators.

At the University of California, Berkeley, he became in 1969 a lecturer, in 1971 an assistant professor, and in 1980 a full professor. U. C. Berkeley awarded him multiple Distinguished Teaching Awards and the Lili Fabilli and Eric Hoffer Essay Prize. and in 2012 a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

He gave in 1981 a simplified proof of the Groenewold-Van Hove theorem, which is a no-go theorem that relates classical mechanics to quantum mechanics.

Selected publications

Paul Chernoff Product formulas, nonlinear semigroups, and addition of unbounded operators, American Mathematical Society 1974. Paul Chernoff; Jerrold Marsden: Properties of infinite dimensional Hamiltonian systems, Springer 1974

(There is a typographical error: "One can show that C(s) may be analytically continued at least into the half-plane Re s > 0 except for an isolated singularity (presumably a simple pole) at s = 0." This should be "at s = 1" according to the mathematical argument given.)