Julian Schwinger

Julian Schwinger
Schwinger in 1965
Born
Julian Seymour Schwinger

(1918-02-12)February 12, 1918
DiedJuly 16, 1994(1994-07-16) (aged 76)
Alma materCity College of New York
Columbia University (BA, PhD)
Known forQuantum electrodynamics
Electroweak interaction
Cavity perturbation theory
Dyon
Spin–statistics theorem
MacMahon Master theorem
Source theory
Mutually unbiased bases
Keldysh formalism
List of things named after Julian Schwinger
SpouseClarice Carrol (m. 1947) (1917-2011)
AwardsAlbert Einstein Award (1951)
National Medal of Science (1964)
Nobel Prize in Physics (1965)
Scientific career
FieldsQuantum field theory
InstitutionsUniversity of California, Berkeley
Purdue University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Harvard University
University of California, Los Angeles
University of Chicago
ThesisOn the magnetic scattering of neutrons (1939)
Doctoral advisorIsidor Isaac Rabi
Doctoral studentsRichard Arnowitt
Roy Glauber
Ben R. Mottelson
Eugen Merzbacher
Sheldon Glashow
Walter Kohn
Bryce DeWitt
Daniel Kleitman
Sam Edwards
Gordon Baym
Lowell S. Brown
Stanley Deser
Lawrence Paul Horwitz
Margaret G. Kivelson
Tung-Mow Yan
Charles M. Sommerfield
Kenneth Alan Johnson

Julian Schwinger, winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics. Original caption: "His laboratory is his ballpoint pen."

Julian Seymour Schwinger (/ˈʃwɪŋər/; February 12, 1918 – July 16, 1994) was a Nobel Prize-winning American theoretical physicist. He is best known for his work on quantum electrodynamics (QED), in particular for developing a relativistically invariant perturbation theory, and for renormalizing QED to one loop order. Schwinger was a physics professor at several universities.

Schwinger is recognized as an important physicist, responsible for much of modern quantum field theory, including a variational approach, and the equations of motion for quantum fields. He developed the first electroweak model, and the first example of confinement in 1+1 dimensions. He is responsible for the theory of multiple neutrinos, Schwinger terms, and the theory of the spin-3/2 field.