Paul Dirac and the religion of mathematical beauty

View Paul Dirac and the religion of mathematical beauty

Presenter: Graham Farmelo

Published: December 2012

Age: 18-22 and upwards

Views: 1736 views

Tags: Paul Dirac

Type: Lectures

Source/institution: Royal Society


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For the great theoretical physicist Paul Dirac FRS, the importance of mathematical beauty was ‘like a religion’. Although his first papers on quantum mechanics showed an acute aesthetic awareness, he first set out his principle of mathematical beauty only in 1939, a decade after he did his best work. In this talk, Farmelo will discuss the origins of Dirac’s aesthetic sensibility and take a look at the extraordinary personality of the physicist Niels Bohr once called ‘the strangest man’.  Graham Farmelo is a Bye-Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. His biography of Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man, won the 2009 Costa Biography Prize and the 2010 Los Angeles Times Prize for Best Science Book.