Re: Today's jaw dropper

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@mindspring.com>]

> On Tue, 7 Oct 1997 11:24:40 -0700 Leigh Palmer <palmer@sfu.ca> writes:
>
> Mathematicians have often objected to the way physicists
> > do mathematics (e.g. Dirac's delta function) but usually have
> > recanted later and "legitimized" established physical practices
> > as bona fide mathematics.
> ***************************************************************************
> Don't you mean the way electrical engineers do mathematics?   Wasn't
> Heaviside the originator of generalized functions and Laurent Schwarz the
> legitimizer?   I see Dirac's name, but ...  Wouldn't the function precede
> its derivative?   Sidelight: Schwarz was the biggest name except for
> Russell who marched in anti-Viet Nam War protests.    I may have saved
> the photograph.
>
> Regards and apologies if I am wrong / Tom
> >
> P.S.  Didn't Dirac have a VERY famous graduate student?  Could it have
> been Einstein even?    I thought not.

Couldn't have been Einstein. Dirac was at least twenty years younger than
Einstein.
But it is an interesting question. I have never heard of a student of
Dirac's being well-known. If there was one, I'd be interested in knowing.
But if not, that's not unusual. I don't believe that Einstein, Schroedinger
or Feynman turned out any notable (i.e., famous) students. Of course
students who later become famous are rare, even for the best teachers, so
it should not be surprising if even someone with the reputation of Feynman
didn't have any famous students. (I have, however, heard that Feynman
didn't particularly enjoy supervising PhD students because he didn't have
the patience to let the student struggle with a problem that he could see
the answer to almost immediately.)

There were some places and teachers who did turn out lots of top flight
students. Rutherford and Thomson did, and many of the early quantum
theorists in Germany did.

At the AAPT meeting in Denver, Yardley Beers raised an interesting point,
when he traced his "PhD lineage" back to (my menory is shaky here) I
believe either Rutherford or Thomson. Maybe someone else who was also at
that session can correct my memory. In any event, it should be an
interesting exercise to trace the lineage of our "physics fathers or
mothers" back and see if there is a notable somewhere along the line. This
has nothing to do with the original comment about Dirac, but it might be
fun to pursue on an individual basis.

Hugh

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Hugh Haskell
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

The box said "Requires Windows 95 or better." So I bought a Macintosh.
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