Paul Dirac

Paul Dirac died October 20, 1984 and was laid to rest at the Tallahassee's Roselawn Cemetery.

The University of New South Wales awards the 'Silver Dirac Medal', the Florida State University awards the 'Dirac-Hellman Award' and the Institute of Physics awards the 'Paul Dirac Medal' in Dirac's honour.

Paul Dirac was born on August 8, 1902 in Bristol, England. His father, Charles Dirac, was a French teacher and his mother, Florence Hannah Dirac, worked in a library.

He had an elder brother, Reginald Felix, and a younger sister, Beatrice Marguerite. Their father was a strict disciplinarian and imposed the use of French language in the house.

After completing his school education in 1918 he studied electrical engineering at the University of Bristol on a scholarship and completed his degree in 1921. Even his first-class honours degree could not get him a job in those post World War I recession times.

He cleared the entrance examination for St John's College, Cambridge University and received a £70 scholarship. But as the overall costs of living and studying in Cambridge exceeded his budget, he gave up this opportunity.

The University of Bristol offered him a B.A. in Mathematics with no tuition fees, which he accepted. After graduating in 1923 with first class honours, he received a £140 scholarship from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.

In 1928, he postulated a relativistic equation of motion for the wave function of the electron which established a connection between relativity and quantum mechanics. This became his famous ‘Dirac Equation'.

The formulation of the equation led to another scientific revelation—the prediction of existence of positron (anti-particle to electron), in a theoretical model of the vacuum known as the 'Dirac Sea'.

His book 'Principles of Quantum Mechanics' published in 1930 consolidated the works on matrix mechanics and wave mechanics into a single mathematical formalism.

The book introduced the delta function and in the third edition (1939), he included the bra-ket notation which enabled it to be used universally.

Dirac was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge from 1932 to 1969. During the World War II he directed the theoretical and experimental research on

While working for his doctorate in the 1920s, he became one of early pioneers in quantum mechanics by submitting the first ever thesis on quantum mechanics to be submitted anywhere, and later he founded quantum electrodynamics.

In 1928 he derived the 'Spin-1/2 Dirac Equation' equation which predicted the existence of ‘antiparticles’, particles with the same mass as particles of ordinary matter but the opposite electric charge. He became the 'discoverer' of antimatter.