Julian Seymour Schwinger
(1918 - 1994)
American physicist, and joint winner with Richard P. Feynman and Tomonaga
Shin'ichiro, of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965 for his work in
formulating quantum electrodynamics and thus reconciling quantum mechanics
with Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity.
A child prodigy, Schwinger received his Ph.D. from Columbia University
at age 21. From 1939 to 1941 he worked under J. Robert Oppenheimer at
the University of California, Berkeley. In 1945 Schwinger joined the
faculty of Harvard University, where in 1947 he became one of the youngest
full professors in that university's history. It was at Harvard that
he began working to correct P.A.M. Dirac's mathematical account of the
relations between charged particles and electromagnetic fields. Schwinger's
equations not only saved Dirac's theory but served to unite electromagnetic
theory with quantum mechanics to form the new field of quantum electrodynamics.
Schwinger completed his work unaware that Feynman and Tomonaga were
independently working on the same problem. From 1972 until his death
he was professor of physics at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Selected Papers (1937-1976) of Julian Schwinger, ed. by M. Flato, C.
Fronsdal, and K.A. Milton (1979), collects some of his writings. Silvan
S. Schweber, QED and the Men Who Made It: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger,
and Tomonaga (1994), is an essential intellectual history of the major
figures in the development of quantum electrodynamics.