Paul Dirac
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, OM (August 8, 1902 in Bristol - October 20, 1984 in Tallahassee) was an English physicist.
Dirac's father came from the French-speaking part of Switzerland.
Dirac worked out a formulation of quantum mechanics, which includes Erwin Schrodinger's wave mechanics and Werner Heisenberg's matrix mechanics in 1926. In 1928 he found the Dirac equation and he found out that spin in quantum mechanics is an effect of relativity. The Dirac equation allowed Dirac to predict the existence of antimatter, which is the opposite of matter.
In 1933 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Dirac was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics chair at Cambridge University from 1932 until his retirement in 1969. He was Professor of Physics at Florida State University from 1972 until his death in 1984.
References
Related pages
Dirac delta function
Other websites
Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics
Dirac Medal of the World Association of Theoretically Oriented Chemists (WATOC)
Photographs of Dirac
The Paul Dirac Collection at Florida State University
The Paul A. M. Dirac Collection Finding Aid at Florida State University
Photocopies of Dirac's papers from the Florida State University collection, held under Dirac's name in the Archive Centre of Churchill College, Cambridge, UK
Letters from Dirac (1932-36) and other papers, held in the Personal Papers archives of St John's College, Cambridge, UK
Annotated bibliography for Paul Dirac from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues
1902 births
1984 deaths
Alumni of the University of Cambridge
British Nobel Prize winners
English physicists
Order of Merit
Alumni of the University of Bristol
British theoretical physicists
Florida State University faculty