Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1902-84) shared the Nobel Prize with Schrödinger in 1933. He was the youngest scientific theoretician ever to win the prize and is known for his achievement of co-discovering  quantum mechanics as well as his prediction of antimatter.

Graham Farmelo’s prize-winning biography is meticulously researched and sheds light on this elusive pioneer of quantum theory. Of  French-English parentage,  he was difficult to know and uninterested in fame. Yet Dirac loved his family and was a loyal friend. Although he was recognised as a mathematical genius, financial difficulty initially barred his entry to Cambridge. We follow his struggle, including one delightful incident where the college lecturer turns to him to ask, “I have gone wrong, can you spot it?”

Farmelo recounts Dirac’s immense contribution to science and his reaction to the development of the nuclear bomb in the war years as well as his relationships with the other great scientists of the period. This is one of the great scientific biographies that shed new light on a personality and on the period.

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