One thing I hadn't appreciated until recently was that Dirac held the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge. The list of people who have held this post is really rather impressive:
When he died, it was felt that the memory of such an extraordinary man should not be permitted to die out, and his papers should be published. So his papers were examined, and nothing whatever worth publishing was found
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Not being a physicist, but hanging out with control engineers for many years, I was actually introduced to Dirac through his Delta Function:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_delta_function
One thing I hadn't appreciated until recently was that Dirac held the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge. The list of people who have held this post is really rather impressive:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucasian_Professor_of_Mathemati...
Hah I was just going through the list of Lucasian professors, and found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_King
When he died, it was felt that the memory of such an extraordinary man should not be permitted to die out, and his papers should be published. So his papers were examined, and nothing whatever worth publishing was found
He was also quite modest, not naming equations after himself, and used to refer to Fermi-Dirac statistics as "Fermi statistics".
Btw, how did PAM Dirac come up? Is it some celebration i am unaware of?
The earlier HN thread about Feynman mentions Dirac:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3230826