Julian Schwinger, born in New York City in 1918 and died in 1994, was one of the greatest theorists in physics in the 20th century. He was the son of Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Poland. The family business was clothing manufacturing, he chose a career in physics. His work was characteristized by brilliance.

He is primarily remembered for his part in the development of quantum electrodynamics (QED) for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1965 with Richard Feynman. His and Feynman's approach differed considerably. Feynman was intuitional and Schwinger was more formalistic.

Schwinger devoted a good deal of his time and effort to developing quantum field theory.

His approach to proving the Spin-Statistics Theorem was characteristically brilliant. Here is an excerpt from the abstract to his article.

[…] It will be shown in Section III that that the requirement of invariance under time reflection imposes a restriction on the operator properties of the fields, which is simply the connection between the spin and statistics of particles.

(To be continued.)

Ian Duck and ,E.C.G. Sudarshan, Pauli and the Spin-Statistics Theorem,, World Scientific, Singapore, 1997.