Dirac was born in Bristol, England, on August 8, 1902. His mother was English and his father was Swiss. Dirac earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Bristol in 1921. When he was unable to find a job in engineering, he returned to Bristol to study mathematics. After two years at Bristol, he moved to St. John's College, Cambridge, from which he received a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1926.

Dirac's earliest success involved the application of quantum mechanics to electromagnetic theory. He applied the concept of "oscillators" to James Clerk Maxwell 's theory of electromagnetism to yield a new way of looking at electromagnetic phenomena, an approach that is now described as quantum field theory.

In 1929, Dirac began to look for a way of describing the properties of an electron by means of mathematical equations. The equations he developed, based only on the electron' s mass and...