page_title: Andrew M. Gleason
section_title: Quantum mechanics
hierarchical_section_title: Andrew M. Gleason / Mathematics research / Quantum mechanics
caption_attribution_description: English: Mathematician Andrew Mattei Gleason with family cat Fred
context_page_description: Andrew Mattei Gleason was an American mathematician who made fundamental contributions to widely varied areas of mathematics, including the solution of Hilbert's fifth problem, and was a leader in reform and innovation in math­e­mat­ics teaching at all levels. Gleason's theorem in quantum logic and the Greenwood–Gleason graph, an important example in Ramsey theory, are named for him.
  As a young World War II naval officer, Gleason broke German and Japanese military codes. After the war he spent his entire academic career at Harvard University, from which he retired in 1992. His numerous academic and scholarly leadership posts included chairmanship of the Harvard Mathematics Department and the Harvard Society of Fellows, and presidency of the American Mathematical Society. He continued to advise the United States government on cryptographic security, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on math­e­mat­ics education for children, almost until the end of his life.
  Gleason won the Newcomb Cleveland Prize in 1952 and the Gung–Hu Distinguished Service Award of the American Mathematical Society in 1996.
context_section_description: The Born rule states that an observable property of a quantum system is defined by a Hermitian operator on a separable Hilbert space, that the only observable values of the property are the eigenvalues of the operator, and that the probability of the system being observed in a particular eigenvalue is the square of the absolute value of the complex number obtained by projecting the state vector (a point in the Hilbert space) onto the corresponding eigenvector. 
  George Mackey had asked whether Born's rule is a necessary consequence of a particular set of axioms for quantum mechanics, and more specifically whether every measure on the lattice of projections of a Hilbert space can be defined by a positive operator with unit trace. Though Richard Kadison proved this was false for two-dimensional Hilbert spaces, Gleason's theorem (published 1957) shows it to be true for higher dimensions.
  Gleason's theorem implies the nonexistence of certain types of hidden variable theories for quantum mechanics, strengthening a previous argument of John von Neumann. Von Neumann had claimed to show that hidden variable theories were impossible, but (as Grete Hermann pointed out) his demonstration made an assumption that quantum systems obeyed a form of additivity of expectation for noncommuting operators that might not hold a priori. In 1966, John Stewart Bell showed that Gleason's theorem could be used to remove this extra assumption from von Neumann's argument.
caption: With family cat Fred about 1966
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