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How Good in Math Was Paul Dirac

Paul Dirac had an unrivaled grasp of mathematics that allowed him to foresee major mathematical discoveries in quantum field theory decades before they were formally defined. He introduced concepts like Dirac monopoles and the Dirac delta function that led to advances in topology, geometry, and functional analysis. Dirac also curiously studied properties of quintic equations and spinors in curved spacetime well before related fields like string theory and conformal field theory developed.

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228 views

How Good in Math Was Paul Dirac

Paul Dirac had an unrivaled grasp of mathematics that allowed him to foresee major mathematical discoveries in quantum field theory decades before they were formally defined. He introduced concepts like Dirac monopoles and the Dirac delta function that led to advances in topology, geometry, and functional analysis. Dirac also curiously studied properties of quintic equations and spinors in curved spacetime well before related fields like string theory and conformal field theory developed.

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03/03/2017 Home - Quora

How good in math was Paul Dirac?


Tarun Chitra, I did String Theory research and I currently work on
computational simulations of various condensed-matter ...
Updated Nov 8, 2011 Upvoted by Jeff L Jones, PhD Theoretical Physics and George
Hagstrom, I have a Phd in physics from the University of Texas at Austin, the topic of my
thesis was plasma p

Amazing.

Dirac had a grasp of mathematics that was unrivaled by most physicists other than von Neumann
(who was perhaps the greatest polymath of this century) and Witten. He had a stunning ability to
foresee some of the great mathematical discoveries of the 20th century except that he discovered
them while probing quantum field theory carefully. Here are a few examples:
Dirac Monopoles and Chern Classes: Dirac monopoles arise when topological defects

in spacetime make the Maxwell equation B=0impossible to satisfy. Dirac


B=0

had a very good grasp on the intuition behind topological defects/obstructions and in his
seminal paper,Quantised Singularities in the Electromagnetic Field, he effectively found
the first example of a Chern Class. A Chern Class is a specific (complex) characteristic
class (that is, a specific mapping M H (M) MH(M) for a complex manifold M M)
that one can use to answer topological questions related to the intrinsic curvature of a
space. Dirac's intuition predated Chern's formal definition of the Chern class by roughly
twenty years. In fact, one of my advisors told me that at a conference in Stony Brook in
the late 70s, Chern spoke of how Dirac's discoveries inspired him to consider the objects
that would later become known as Chern-Simons forms. A good beginner's guide to
this relationship between physics and geometry is [0].

Dirac Bracket and Generalized Complex Geometry: I sort of gave a technical


explanation of this in the question, What is the Dirac bracket in geometric
language? Effectively, Dirac found a generalization of symplectic manifolds (without
realizing it) that has turned out to be of immense interest in contemporary differential
geometry.

The Dirac function and the Dirac Measure: Ah, the famous example that has
taught a generation of physicists to tell the mathematicians that they are wasting their
time studying analysis. Dirac realized the limitations of considering wavefunctions and
wavepackets that were "true" functions. He boldly introduced the Dirac -function,
which led to 30 years of intense mathematical research to explain its existence. Of course,
Laurent Schwartz won the Fields Medal for building up the general framework for the
Dirac measure (which is technically what the -function is) and we now have a much
broader understanding of the functional analysis involved in non-relativistic quantum

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03/03/2017 Home - Quora

mechanics.

Dirac's curious foray into the study of quintics: This is one of the most curious
mathematical endeavors of Dirac. In 1936, Dirac wrote a paper in the Annals of
Mathematics [1] entitled Wave Equations in Conformal Space. This paper contains some
familiar results to those who study String Theory or Conformal Field Theory and in this
paper, Dirac studies properties of a specific quintic equation. It is interesting to note that
his discussion comes quite close to the famed quintic Calabi-Y au manifold. Moreover,
Dirac talks about spinors in curved spacetime and hints at some topological constraints
[2]. I think that the paper was before its time in that one can find many CFT papers of
later years that reproduced a lot of these results. It is amazing that Dirac had the foresight
to consider conformal field theories before renormalization was even invented!

I will leave us with my favorite quote of Dirac's from Quantised Singularities in the
Electromagnetic Field:

The steady progress of physics requires for its theoretical formulation a mathematics that gets
continually more advanced. This is only natural and
to be expected. What, however, was not expected by the scientific workers
of the last century was the particular form that the line of advancement of
the mathematics would take, namely, it was expected that the mathematics
would get more and more complicated, but would rest on a permanent
basis of axioms and definitions, while actually the modem physical developments have required
a mathematics that continually shifts its foundations and gets more abstract. Non-euclidean
geometry and non-commutative algebra, which were at one time considered to be purely
fictions of the mind and pastimes for logical thinkers, have now been found to be very necessary
for the description of general facts of the physical world. It seems likely that this process of
increasing abstraction will continue in the future and that advance in physics is to be associated
with a continual modification and generalisation of the axioms at the base of the mathematics
rather than with a logical development of any one mathematical scheme on a fixed foundation.

[0] Geometry, Topology and Physics, M. Nakahara


[1] This should be a good indicator of Dirac's mathematical prowess, in and of itself!
[2] In modern language, this constraint is simply that the first Stiefel-Whitney class vanishes, i.e.
w1 (M) = 0

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