Speaker
Alexander Blum
Description
I will give a historical overview of the various claims that (certain) physical quantities should be represented by analytic functions. I will show that there were two very distinct reasons for postulating such an “analyticity principle": (i) the expectation that (our representation of) the world should be both mathematically simple and infinitely smooth, an expectation that came to be disputed, in particular by the French mathematicians Henri Poincaré and Jacques Hadamard, and (ii) the association of analyticity with causality, which began in the work of Hans Kramers and Ralph Kronig and then became central to 1960s S-Matrix theory.
Author
Alexander Blum
Co-authors
Dominic Dold
Jens Salomon