Fock, Vladimir Aleksandrovich

Vladimir Aleksandrovich Fock, (born Dec. 22 [Dec. 10, Old Style], 1898, St. Petersburg, Russia—died Dec. 27, 1974, Leningrad, Russia, U.S.S.R. [now St. Petersburg, Russia]), Russian mathematical physicist who made seminal contributions to quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity.

Fock became progressively deaf at a young age because of injuries sustained during military service in World War I. In 1922 he graduated from Petrograd University (Saint Petersburg State University), and he taught there from 1924, becoming a professor in 1932. The Hartree-Fock equation, improved by him in 1930, became a basic approximation method for calculations involving multielectron atoms in quantum chemistry. He also introduced the Fock representation (1928) for a quantum oscillator, particularly important in quantum field theory; the Fock space with varying dimensions (1932) to legitimize the second quantization (many-body formalism); and the method of Fock functionals (1934) for treating systems with an indeterminate number of particles in quantum electrodynamics. In 1926 Fock and several other physicists independently proposed a relativistic generalization of the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s wave equation.

Fock was arrested on phony political charges in 1937, during the Great Purge, but he was quickly released thanks to the Russian physicist Pyotr Kapitsa, who appealed directly to Joseph Stalin. In 1939 Fock solved the problem of the motion of ponderable bodies (objects with appreciable mass) in Albert Einstein’s general relativity by using harmonic coordinates. In 1939 Fock was elected a full member of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences (he had been a corresponding member since 1932). Fock also developed philosophical interpretations of relativity and quantum mechanics that he considered consistent with Marxism.