Victory on home ground

In the field of mathematics, Dirac was on home ground. His success as a physical mathematician was phenomenal. Following Werner Heisenberg’s publication of the idea of a new quantum mechanics in 1925, Dirac independently went to work on creating an appropriate new mathematics for handling it. The result was his p-q number theory, completed in 1928, a “highly original and extremely elegant mathematical technique” in which “he showed how the theories of quantum mechanics and relativity could be combined.” In 1930 he published his textbook of quantum mechanics, which immediately became a classic. In 1932, at the incredibly early age of 30, he was appointed Lucrasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, the chair Sir Isaac Newton had once occupied—a fitting post for one whom Niels Bohr called “the most remarkable scientific mind since Newton.”

Dirac was not successful in electrical engineering, but when he entered his own domain—mathematics—he thrived and showed amazingly innovative genius. Like Dirac, everyone has a domain of his own in which he can excel. Failure in one field is no reason to lose hope: there is always another field awaiting one, in which the flower of one’s destiny can flourish and thrive.