Gian-Carlo Wick - Life

Life

Wick's father was a chemical engineer, and his mother, Barbara Allason (1877–1968), was a well-known Italian writer and anti-fascist. His paternal grandfather had emigrated from Switzerland to Italy and his grandmother from Austria. In 1930 he received his degree in Turin under G. Wataghin with a thesis on the electronic theory of metals, and then went to Göttingen and Leipzig to study physics. One of the professors he got to know there was Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg liked the young Italian theoretician-they shared a common interest in classic music- and treated him with an affection that Wick never forgot. Once a week, Heisenberg had invited Wick and other students to his home for spirited evenings of talk and Ping-Pong. Back in Turin, he became Enrico Fermi's assistant in Rome in 1932. In 1937 he became professor of theoretical physics in Palermo, then in Padua, before, in 1940, he returned to Rome and became chair of theoretical physics. In 1946 he followed Fermi to the United States, first to the University of Notre Dame, then to Berkeley. Since he refused a required oath during the McCarthy era (he had inherited strong liberal views from his mother), he went to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh in 1951, where he remained until 1957, interrupted by stays at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at CERN in Geneva. In 1957 he became chief of the theory department at Brookhaven National Laboratory. In 1965 he became a tenured professor at Columbia University in New York City, where he collaborated with Tsung-Dao Lee; after his retirement from Columbia he worked at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.

In 1967 he received the Dannie Heineman Prize. In 1968 he received the first Ettore Majorana Prize. He was a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Accademia dei Lincei.

Wick was an avid mountain climber. He was twice married and had two sons.