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Paul Dirac Facts

Paul Dirac Facts
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac OM FRS (August 8, 1902 to October 20, 1984) was an English theoretical physicist. He made fundamental contributions to both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. In 1933 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Erwin Schrodinger for "the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory."
Interesting Paul Dirac Facts:
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born in Bristol, England.
His father was a Swiss immigrant who taught French and his mother was a librarian.
He attended the Cotham School where his father taught French.
Dirac studied electrical engineering at the University of Bristol on a City of Bristol University Scholarship.
After graduation with a BS in engineering he studied for a BA in mathematics.
In 1923 he graduated with first class honors and entered Cambridge University, St John's College.
From 1925 to 1928 he had an 1851 Research Fellowship which had been established by the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851.
In June 1926 he earned his PhD from Cambridge University with the first thesis ever submitted on quantum mechanics.
He was a very quiet man and his colleagues joked that a conversation "dirac" was one word per hour.
Dirac established the quantum field theory mechanics and the first to describe antimatter.
He was the first to formulate the equation for the time evolution of a quantum-mechanical operator.
His development of a quantum field theory with dynamic constraints forms the basis of superstring theory and gauge theory.
In 1928 he postulated the existence of the positron and it was later observed by Carl Anderson in 1932.
In 1930 he published Principles of Quantum Mechanics which quickly became the standard textbook on the subject.
From 1932 to 1969 he was Lucasian Professor Mathematics at Cambridge.
He moved to Florida to be near his older sister, Mary and spent the last fourteen years of his life as a professor at the University of Miami, Coral Gables and Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida.
In addition to the 1933 Nobel Prize for physics, he received many other awards including the Royal Medal in 1939, and the Copley Medal and Max Planck Medal in 1952.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1930, and became a member of the Order of Merit in 1973.


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