Res Jost

R. Jost used the new methods of Wightman theory to prove the PCT theorem, without any assumptions on the nature of the interactions. His deep and amusing lectures at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1960 influenced the shape of the book PCT, Spin and Statistics, and All That that I wrote with Wightman.

I visited Zurich in about 1965, and heard that Jost was giving a lecture on quantum statistical mechanics. I arrived a couple of minutes late, and found Jost going critically through an early paper on the subject. He was able to give short, rigorous proofs (missing in the original) of the steps used in the work, until he came to to one huge step, which he was not sure was true; the author had made some sort of argument, and Jost said "...at this point it is difficult to work out what the author had in mind". Everyone fell about laughing. What I had missed in the first minutes of the talk was that Jost himself was the author.

Jost visited Princeton again while I was there during another visit, maybe around 1966. I asked him what he was interested in now, and got the reply "Mushrooms"; he had developed a quite serious amateur interest in growing exotic edibles.