Paul Dirac and the Religion of Mathematical Beauty

Friday, February 15, 2013
Ballroom A (Hynes Convention Center)
Max Tegmark , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
In 1974, Paul Dirac described his principle of mathematical beauty as “almost a religion to me.” Farmelo, a historian of physics as well as the noted biographer of Paul Dirac, will discuss why Dirac did develop this principle, what it enabled Dirac to discover, and what it prevented Dirac from seeing correctly.