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Paul Dirac was born in the English city of Bristol. His father, Charles Dirac, was an immigrant from the Valais Canton in Switzerland who taught French for a living. His mother was originally from Cornwall and the daughter of a mariner. Paul had an elder brother and an younger sister. His early family life appears to have been unhappy on account of his father's unusually strict and authoritarian nature, but he never publicly expressed his feelings on the subject. He was educated first at Bishop Primary School and later at Merchant Venturers Technical College. The latter was an institution, attached to the University of Bristol, that emphasized scientific subjects and modern languages (an unusual arrangement at a time when secondary education in Britain was still dedicated largely to the classics, and something for which Dirac would later express gratitude).
Dirac studied electrical engineering at the University of Bristol, completing his degree in 1921. After working briefly as an engineer, Dirac decided that his true calling lay in the mathematical sciences. He completed a degree in mathematics at Bristol in 1923 and then received a grant to conduct research at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he would remain for most of his career. At CambridgeThe University of Cambridge is the second-oldest academic institution in the English-speaking world (after Oxford). According to legend, the University was founded in 1209 by scholars escaping Oxford after a fight with locals. Cambridge and the University he became interested in the general theory of relativity and in the nascent field of quantum physics, and worked under the supervision of Ralph Fowler.
In 1926Centuries: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s Years: 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 See also 1926 in aviation 1926 in film 1926 in literature 1926 in mu he developed a version of quantum mechanicswavefunctions of an electron in a hydrogen atom possessing definite energy (increasing downward: n 1,2,3,. and angular momentum (increasing across: s p d . Brighter areas correspond to higher probability density for a position measurement. The angular mom that incorporated the previous work of Werner Heisenberg on “Matrix Mechanics” and of Erwin Schrödinger on “Wave Mechanics” into a single mathematical formalism that associates measurable quantities with operators acting on the Hilbert space of vectors that describe the state of a physical system. For this seminal work he was awarded a Ph.D. from Cambridge.
In 1928, building on Pauli's work on nonrelativistic spin systems, he derived the Dirac equation, a relativistic equation describing the electron. This work led Dirac to predict the existence of the positron, the electron's antiparticle, which he interpreted in terms of what came to be called the Dirac sea. The positron was subsequently observed by Carl Anderson in 1932. Dirac also contributed to explaining the origin of quantum spin as a relativistic phenomenon.
Dirac's Principles of Quantum Mechanics, published in 1930 became one of the standard textbooks on the subject and is still used today. It introduced the Bra-ket notation, in which |ψ>, ket, denotes a state vector in the Hilbert space of a system and <ψ|, bra, its dual vector. <ψ|ψ> denotes an inner product. Dirac also introduced Dirac's delta function.
In 1931 Dirac showed that the existence of a single magnetic monopole in the universe would suffice to explain the observed quantization of electrical charge. This proposal received much attention but there is to date no convincing evidence for the existence of magnetic monopoles.
Paul Dirac shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1933 with Erwin Schrödinger "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory." Dirac was Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge from 1932 to 1969. The Dirac Prize is awarded in his honour.
Dirac spent his last years at Florida State University (FSU) in Tallahassee, Florida. The Dirac-Hellman Award at FSU was endowed by Dr. Bruce Hellman (Dirac's last Ph.D. student) in 1997 to reward outstanding work in theoretical physics by FSU researchers. He died in Tallahassee, where he is buried. In 1995 a plaque in his honour was unveiled at Westminster Abbey in London.
He married Eugene Wigner's daughter, Margit in 1937.