Born #onthisday in 1902, Paul Dirac was an English theoretical physicist who is regarded as one of the most significant physicists of the 20th century. He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a professor of physics at Florida State University and the University of Miami, and a 1933 Nobel Prize recipient.

Dirac made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. Among other discoveries, he formulated the Dirac equation which describes the behavior of fermions and predicted the existence of antimatter. Dirac shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Erwin Schrödinger "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory". He also made significant contributions to the reconciliation of general relativity with quantum mechanics.

Dirac also invented the "Dirac notation" (aka bra-ket notation), which is very handy for all sorts of computations (especially in quantum mechanics) and among many other things studied what today we call the Dirac Delta Function. See, for example,

https://davidmeyer.github.io/qc/density.pdf and
https://davidmeyer.github.io/qc/dirac_delta.pdf

or the images. As always, questions/comments/corrections/* greatly appreciated.

#math #maths #dirac #diracdeltafunction