Born in Waltham, Massachusetts, on June 8, 1936, Kenneth Geddes Wilson was the oldest of six children born to Edgar Bright Wilson, Jr., a chemistry professor at Harvard University, and the former Emily Fisher Buckingham.

At the age of sixteen, Wilson was accepted as a freshman into Harvard University, from which he received a B.A. in math and physics in 1956. He chose to do his graduate work in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, where his advisor was Murray Gell-Mann. Wilson's doctoral thesis dealt with quantum field theory, an area of physics that attempts to integrate relativity theory with quantum mechanics (the object behind combining these two major theories was to develop an overall conceptual picture of the physical world). In particular, Wilson investigated an aspect of quantum electrodynamics (QED) that had been particularly troubling for theoretical physicists. The use of traditional QED theory, which describes the...