Julian Schwinger, Nobel Prize in Physics and teacher of four other Nobel Prizes

12 February 1918, New York (USA) - 16 July 1994, Los Angeles (USA)

Julian Seymour Schwinger studied physics at the City College of New York and then transferred to Columbia University, where he received his B.A. in 1936 and his Ph.D., supervised by I.I. Rabi, in 1939. He worked at the University of California (Berkeley), under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and then was hired at Purdue University.

During World War II, he worked at the Radiation Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), providing theoretical advice for the development of radar. He tried to apply his knowledge as a nuclear physicist to the engineering problems of electromagnetism and ended up with nuclear scattering. As a result, Schwinger began to apply his experience of radiation to quantum physics.

After the war, he left Purdue for Harvard University, where he taught from 1945 to 1972. During that time, he developed the concept of renormalisation, which explained the "Lamb effect" in the electron magnetic field, predicted the phenomenon of electron-positron pairs, known as the "Schwinger effect", and realised from his study of elementary particles that neutrinos can exist in multiple varieties, associated with lepton types such as the electron and muon, which was later experimentally verified.

He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his work in quantum electrodynamics (QED), together with Richard Feynman and Shinichiro Tomonaga.

He supervised more than 60 doctoral dissertations and is known as one of the most prolific advisors in physics. Four of his students won a Nobel Prize: Roy Glauber, Benjamin Roy Mottelson, Sheldon Gashow, and Walter Kohn.

In 1972, he left Harvard for the University of California where he continued his work on the development of source theory.