Word.ws English Dictionary

Wick's theorem

Wick's theorem proper noun: a method of reducing high-order derivatives to a combinatorics problem, used extensively in quantum field theory to reduce arbitrary products of creation and annihilation operators to sums of products of pairs of these operators.

Proper noun

Wick's theorem

  1. (quantum mechanics) A method of reducing high-order derivatives to a combinatorics problem, used extensively in quantum field theory to reduce arbitrary products of creation and annihilation operators to sums of products of pairs of these operators.

Origin of Wick's theorem

Named after Gian-Carlo Wick (1909–1992), Italian theoretical physicist.

Questions about Wick's theorem

What does Wick's theorem mean?
Wick's theorem means a method of reducing high-order derivatives to a combinatorics problem, used extensively in quantum field theory to reduce arbitrary products of creation and annihilation operators to sums of products of pairs of these operators.
What part of speech is Wick's theorem?
Wick's theorem is a proper noun.

Words near Wick's theorem in the dictionary

  1. wick effects
  2. Wick Hill
  3. Wick rotation
  4. Wick rotations
  5. Wick St Lawrence
  6. Wick's theorem
  7. wickable
  8. Wickam
  9. wickape
  10. Wickard
  11. Wickards

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Wick's theorem (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “Wick's theorem.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wick%27s_theorem. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.