Julian Seymour Schwinger
 

Schwinger was born in New York City on February 12, 1918. He entered the City College of New York at the age of fourteen, but soon transferred to Columbia. He earned his bachelor of arts degree three years later and his Ph.D. at the age of twenty-one. After graduation, he worked at the University of California at Berkeley under J. Robert Oppenheimer for two years. During World War II, he worked in the Manhattan Project at the University of California and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the war's conclusion, he was appointed to the faculty at Harvard and, in 1947, became full professor there, one of the youngest men ever to earn this honor. Schwinger received a share of the 1965 Nobel Prize in physics for his research on quantum electrodynamics (QED). Basic QED theory had been developed in the 1920s by Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and others.