Collection: Schwinger’s Magnetic Moment

Julian Seymour Schwinger (1918 – 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 one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, 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.

Schwinger died of pancreatic cancer. He is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery, where this equation is engraved above his name on his tombstone. These symbols refer to his calculation of the correction (“anomalous”) to the magnetic moment of the electron.