Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac
"Physical Laws should have mathematical beauty." This statement was Dirac's
response to the question of his philosophy of physics, posed to him in Moscow in
1955. He wrote it on a blackboard that is still preserved today.[1]
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1902-1984), known as P. A. M. Dirac, was the
fifteenth Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. He shared the Nobel
Prize for Physics in 1933 with Erwin Schrodinger.[2] He is considered to be the
founder of quantum mechanics, providing the transition from quantum theory. The
Cambridge Philosophical Society awarded him the Hopkins Medal in 1930. He was
awarded the Royal Medal by the Royal Society of London in 1939 and the James
Scott ...
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scientific organizations throughout the world. Naturally, he was
a member of the Royal Society, but he was also a member of the Deutsche Akademie
der Naturforsher and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He was a foreign member
of Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques and the Academie des Sciences,
the Accademia delle Scienze Torino and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and
the National Academy of Science. He was an honorary member and fellow of the
Indian Academy of Science, the Chinese Physical Society, the Royal Irish Academy,
the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the National Institute of Sciences in India, the
American Physical Society, the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in India,
the Royal Danish Academy, and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He was a
corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences.[4] The world wide respect
he earned for his work was well deserved.
A prolific writer, Dirac published over two hundred works between 1924
and 1987, mainly ...
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with him generally thought he was a good supervisor, but one who did
not spend much time with his students. A student needed to be extremely
independent to work under Dirac.[9] One such student was Dennis Sciama, who
later became the supervisor of Stephen Hawking, the current holder of the
Lucasian Chair. Dirac's lectures were attended by Sir M. J. Lighthill while he
was a student at Cambridge and Lighthill was Dirac's successor to the Lucasian
Chair.
Dirac offered the first course in quantum mechanics in Britain, entitled Quantum
Theory (Recent Developments) . Among his students was J. R. Oppenheimer, an
American, who later on was in charge of the Manhattan Project, which created ...
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