Portal:England/Selected biography/05 2008



Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, OM, FRS (August 8, 1902 – October 20, 1984) was a British theoretical physicist and a founder of the field of quantum mechanics. Dirac made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. He held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and spent the last ten years of his life at Florida State University. Among other discoveries, he formulated the so-called Dirac equation, which describes the behavior of fermions and which led to the prediction of the existence of antimatter. Dirac shared the Nobel Prize in physics for 1933 with Erwin Schrödinger, "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory. Archives • Read more...