Paul Dirac was born 8 August 1902. In 1923 he went to Cambridge University as a mathematics research student under the theoretical physicist Ralph Fowler. Dirac then did graduate work in statistical physics and quantum theory. He completed his PhD degree at Cambridge in 1926. In 1926 he went to stay at Bohr's Institute in Copenhagen and continued his work. In 1927 he published ‘The Quantum Theory of the Emission and Absorption of Radiation’. From 1927 onwards Dirac lectured on quantum mechanics at Cambridge and in 1930 he published the textbook 'The Principles of Quantum Mechanics'. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1930 and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University in 1932. He received (jointly) the Nobel Prize for his wave equation of the electron in 1933. Dirac married Margit Balazs in 1937. She had a son and a daughter from her previous marriage and they then had two daughters. After he retired in 1969 he went to the University of Miami and in 1971 took up a research professorship at Florida State University, Tallahassee. Dirac died there 20 October 1984.