Speaking of unsung geniuses there is someone who I am always surprised people don't mention more. Everyone knows of Turing - no doubt related to the tragic nature of his death due to disgusting treatment and the ubiquity of his eponymous machine - but not as many know of or laud this person whose influence is at least as great. I guess that is partially of his own fashioning.<p>He laid the practical foundation of digital circuits by noting the applicability of boolean algebra to circuit design. Electronic devices and computers are descendants of his work. After a brief hiatus to work on mathematical biology and cryptography he laid the foundation to the internet with his work on Communications/Information theory and contributions to sampling. His work on information theory is also vital in machine learning, Natural language parsing, compression and more; it finds utility in quantum physics and controversy in gravitational physics. He also had some of the earliest working examples of wearable computing, algorithmic trading, and artificial intelligence.<p>Arguably, mores so than any scientist of recent times, there is not a person whose work more thoroughly infuses and touches our lives than Claude Shannon.
Not being a physicist, but hanging out with control engineers for many years, I was actually introduced to Dirac through his Delta Function:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_delta_function" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_delta_function</a><p>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 <i>rather</i> impressive:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucasian_Professor_of_Mathematics" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucasian_Professor_of_Mathemati...</a>
I recommend Graham Farmelo's 2009 biography of Dirac, <i>The Strangest Man</i>.<p><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/apr/02/paul-dirac-strangest-man-farmelo-quantum" rel="nofollow">http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/apr/02/paul-dirac-str...</a><p>I once started a physics degree at Bristol, where Dirac was born and raised, and the department made a big show of 'their' man. The house he grew up in is a few minutes' walk from the department, and has a blue plaque indicating its status. It was some years before I discovered that Dirac had never been in the physics department at all, but in fact studied electrical engineering, before entering Cambridge, where he flourished as a physicist.
One of my favorite Dirac stories "An interview with Dirac": <a href="http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~greenfie/mill_courses/math421/int.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~greenfie/mill_courses/math421/i...</a>
"He accepted it [Nobel Prize] only when advised that, as the first person to refuse a Nobel Prize, the publicity would be even greater"<p>Couldn't be more true.
You don't need the Dirac equation to understand semiconductor physics. Holes are not positrons, and I'm somewhat skeptical of the idea that if positrons had not been discovered or postulated, that the transistor would not have been invented.<p>Without a doubt, it's really cool that we can say "Hey! We can actually predict that electrons will have spin!", but you don't need to understand that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen to build a steam engine.<p>However, if someone can point me to writings by Shockley, Brattain, or Bardeen, or a historical account that indicates otherwise, I'd be happy to read it :)
A bit of an aside, but one of the best Evangelion episodes invovlves a Dirac Sea: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aoLMp6q3js" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aoLMp6q3js</a>
There's been the same poster of him within an average of 1km from me since I was 17!<p>My Physics class room at college had a copy, then my University had one, and now I have one in my Physics class room.<p>So, pretty sure that he's well sung, at least in the rooms I visit!
Little trivia: The BCC develops a wavelet based video codec they call "Dirac"[0]<p>[0] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_(video_compression_format)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_(video_compression_format...</a>