Dr. P. A. M. Dirac

Abstract

DR. P. A. M. DIRAC, of St. John's College, Cambridge, has been appointed to succeed Sir Joseph Larmor when he vacates the Lucasian chair of mathematics at Cambridge on Sept. 30 next. Dr. Dirac has been one of the most notable of the group of young physicists (mostly within a year or two the same age) who have, during the past seven years, created quantum mechanics. After graduating at the University of Bristol both in engineering and in mathematics, he entered the University of Cambridge as a research student in the Faculty of Mathematics, and may perhaps not unreasonably be accounted fortunate in his time, for he was in the middle of his course for a research degree when the ferment of dissatisfaction with the limitations of the older quantum theory was at its height, and the great blaze of theoretical advance was set alight by Heisenberg's first paper of the autumn of 1925. Dr. Dirac was one of the first to see clearly how the new ideas were to be extended and formalised, and his own researches have played a great part in both these processes, especially in formalisation. His unpublished degree thesis was probably the first such attempt to present in any detail in a consistent and logical way the revolutionary new theory. Later he published a much expanded and revised form of this attempt in his well-known book on quantum mechanics. His most strikingly original and successful contribution to the whole theory is his relativistic theory of the electron, a contribution in which his great mastery of and instinct for form has guided him at once to the correct generalisation. Dr. Dirac will succeed to the Lucasian chair when he is just over thirty years of age, with the acclaimed consent and good wishes of all his colleagues in mathematical physics in Great Britain. His University may look forward to another long and distinguished tenure of a chair to which long and distinguished tenures are by no means unfamiliar.