Paul Dirac was a British theoretical physicist who is particularly known for his attempts to unify the theories of quantum mechanics, and the relativity theory.
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born on 8th August 1902 in Bristol, England. He became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1932, a post he held for the next 37 years.
In 1933, he published a pioneering paper on Lagrangian quantum mechanics. The importance of Dirac’s work lies essentially in his famous wave equation, which introduced special relativity into Erwin Schrodinger’s equation. The equation is a mathematical formulation for studying quantum mechanical systems.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1933 was awarded jointly to Erwin Schrodinger and Paul Dirac for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory.
He was also awarded the Royal Medal in 1939, the Copley Medal, and the Max Planck Medal both in 1952, among other honours, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1930 and of the American Physical Society in 1948.
Dirac died on 20th October 1984, in Florida, US where he is buried.
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