Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac

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"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 Prize from the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 1952 the Max Plank Medal

came from the Association of German Physical Societies, as well as the Copley

Medal from the Royal Society. The Akademie der Wissenschaften in the German

Democratic Republic presented him with the Helmholtz Medal in 1964. In 1969 he

received the Oppenheimer Prize from the University of Miami. Lastly in 1973, he

received the Order of Merit.[3]

Dirac was well known for his almost anti--social behavior, but he was a

member of many 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 papers in physics journals on topics relating to quantum

mechanics. His book Principles of Quantum Mechanics , published in 1930, was the

first textbook in the discipline and became the standard.[5] Some predictions

made by Dirac are still untested because his theoretical work was so far

reaching, but many other predictions have been verified, assuring him of a

special place in the history of physics.[6]

Dirac was three years old when Einstein published his famous papers on

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