Graham Farmelo.
GRAHAM FARMELO: PAUL DIRAC BIOGRAPHY
tHE STRANGEST MAN: THE HIDDEN LIFE OF PAUL DIRAC, QUANTUM GENIUS (2009)
Winner of the 2009 Costa Prize for Biography.
Chosen by Physics World as the Physics Book of the Year.
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Paul Dirac (born 1902) was brought up in Bristol where his father was a French teacher. Dirac was an exceptionally gifted mathematician, who is credited with having laid the foundations of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. He took his BSc degree at the University of Bristol then moved to Cambridge University where in 1926 he obtained his PhD in physics. His thesis was the first to be written on quantum mechanics. He was in 1932 appointed the Lucsian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University; a post he held unti 1969. Moving in later life to Florida, to be close to his daughter Mary, Dirac spent the last fourteen years of his life at the University of Miami and the State University in Tallahassee, Florida. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965.
The Observer described Farmelo’s book as ‘A superb biography’. The Sunday Times described it as: ‘A sensiative study of a complicated genius’.
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Graham Farmelo (born 1953) took his undergraduae degree in mathematical physics and his PhD in particle physics at the University of Liverpool. He then lectured on physics at the Open Univesity. He was a senior executive at the Science Museum in London from 1990 to 2003, where he worked on the delivery of the Wellcome Wing and the Dana Centre. He is now a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. In addition to this book he has written on science for the Scientific American, the New Scientist, the New York Times, and Nature. He was in 2012 awarded the Kelvin Prize and Medal by the Institute of Physics.
