Klaus Hepp

Klaus Hepp was Professor of General Theoretical Physics at the ETH Zurich from 1966 to 2002 (1966/1969 Associate Professor, as of 1969 Full Professor). He was head of the Department of Mathematics and Physics (IX).

Prof. Hepp was born on December 11, 1936 in Kiel, Germany, and studied mathematics and physics at the University of Münster and the ETH Zurich from 1956-1960. He received his degree in theoretical physics in 1960, his doctorate in 1962 under Professor R. Jost and he completed habilitation with his work in theoretical physics in 1963 at the ETH Zurich. Following this he was a staff member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and was appointed Professor at the ETH Zurich. He spent a period of research from 1969 to 1970 at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in Paris; in 1971 he was a Loeb Lecturer at Harvard University in Cambridge MA.

His research principally concerned the fundamental problems of relativistic quantum field theory and statistical mechanics. After his research at MIT in Cambridge MA from 1975-1976, he had focused, in collaboration with the neurologist Professor V. Henn at the University of Zurich, on the interaction of sight, motion and eye movements on a cellular and psychophysical level. He worked closely with the Institute for Neuroinformatics at the ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich, but he continued to teach theoretical physics at the ETH Zurich.