Paul Chernoff

Paul Robert Chernoff (21 June 1942, Philadelphia – 17 January 2017)[1] was an American mathematician, specializing in functional analysis and the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics.

[2] He is known for Chernoff's Theorem, a mathematical result in the Feynman path integral formulation of quantum mechanics.

[3] 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.

He gave in 1981 a simplified proof of the Groenewold-Van Hove theorem,[6][7][8] which is a no-go theorem that relates classical mechanics to quantum mechanics.