Werner Heisenberg Werner Heisenberg Werner Karl Heisenberg (; ; 5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976) was a German theoretical physicist and one of the key pioneers of quantum mechanics. He published his work in 1925 in a breakthrough paper. In the subsequent series of papers with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, during the same year, this matrix formulation of quantum mechanics was substantially elaborated. He is known for the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which he published in 1927. Heisenberg was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the creation of quantum mechanics". He also made important contributions to the theories of
Heisenberg group of differential operators on ℝ with polynomial coefficients, since any such operator has a unique representation in the form This algebra is called the Weyl algebra. It follows from abstract nonsense that the Weyl algebra "W" is a quotient of formula_79. However, this is also easy to see directly from the above representations; viz. by the mapping The application that led Hermann Weyl to an explicit realization of the Heisenberg group was the question of why the Schrödinger picture and Heisenberg picture are physically equivalent. Abstractly, the reason is the Stone–von Neumann theorem: there is a unique unitary representation with