Julian Schwinger

Julian Schwinger
Schwinger in 1965
Born
Julian Seymour Schwinger

(1918-02-12)February 12, 1918
New York City, U.S.
DiedJuly 16, 1994(1994-07-16) (aged 76)
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Alma mater
  • City College of New York
  • Columbia University (BA, PhD)
Known for
SpouseClarice Carrol (m. 1947) (1917-2011)
Awards
  • Albert Einstein Award (1951)
  • National Medal of Science (1964)
  • Nobel Prize in Physics (1965)
Scientific career
FieldsQuantum field theory
Institutions
  • University 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 advisor
Isidor Isaac Rabi
Doctoral students
  • Richard 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
  • Bernard Lippmann
  • Norman Horing

Julian Seymour Schwinger (/ˈʃwɪŋər/; February 12, 1918 – July 16, 1994) was an American theoretical physicist. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics with Richard Feynman and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga "for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics (QED), with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles". He developed a relativistically invariant perturbation theory, and renormalized 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. He shared the inaugural Albert Einstein Award with Kurt Gödel.