Robert Schrader

Robert Schrader (12 September 1939 – 29 November 2015) was a German theoretical and mathematical physicist and professor of the Free University of Berlin. He is known for the Osterwalder–Schrader axioms.

Biography Robert Schrader was born in Berlin, Germany in 1939.

From 1970 to 1973 Schrader was a research fellow at Harvard University and at Princeton University. At Harvard under the supervision of Arthur Jaffe, he worked with Konrad Osterwalder on Euclidean quantum field theory. In 1971 Schrader habilitated at the University of Hamburg with the thesis Das Yukawa Modell in zwei Raum-Zeit-Dimensionen (The Yukawa model in two space-time dimensions). He was a professor of theoretical physics at the Free University of Berlin from 1973 until his retirement in 2005. He was a visiting scientist in 1974 and again in 1980 at the IHÉS at Paris, in 1976 in Harvard, in 1979 at CERN, for the academic year 1986/87 at the Institute for Advanced Study, and in 1989 at the ETH. For two academic years from 1982 to 1984, he was a visiting professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Arthur Jaffe suggested to his postdocs Osterwalder and Schrader that they study the work on the Euclidean formulation of quantum field theory (QFT) done by Kurt Symanzik and Edward Nelson. The two postdocs published a set of axioms, which contained the crucial property called reflection positivity (RP), also referred to as Osterwalder–Schrader positivity. The Osterwalder–Schrader reconstruction theorem states that the Wightman functions of a relativistic QFT can be reconstructed from the Schwinger functions of a Euclidean theory satisfying the Osterwalder-Schrader axioms. RP is important for statistical mechanics and lattice gauge theory. invariants of three-dimensional manifolds, lattice formulation of gravitational theory, quantum chaos, and possibilities for measuring gravitational waves with SQUIDs. His extensive collaboration with Vadim Korstrykin included research on quantum wires and Laplacian operators on metric graphs.

He died from cancer in 2015.

Selected publications