Background

Freeman John Dyson was born on December 15, 1923, in Crowthorne, Berkshire, United Kingdom. His father, George Dyson, was a musician and composer, and his mother, Mildred Atkey, a lawyer. Dyson’s elder sister, Alice, remembered him as a little boy, sitting surrounded by encyclopedias and sheets of paper on which he was calculating things. At the time of Freeman's birth, George was teaching music at Wellington College in Berkshire. He had earlier taught at Marlborough College where he was a colleague and close friend of Mildred's brother Freeman Atkey. After the death of Freeman Atkey, who was killed in action during World War I, both George and Mildred were shattered. It brought them close together and they married in 1916. Their first child Alice was born in 1919, then their second child was Freeman Dyson who was named after Freeman Atkey.

Shortly after Dyson was born, his father accepted the post of Master of Music at Winchester College, and so Freeman spent his early years in Winchester. He was closer to his mother than to his father, for she was the more serious of the two being extremely talented and well-read. The family was well off and employed a cook, gardener, housemaid, and nursemaid.

Education

Freeman Dyson attended a day school run by Miss Scott from the time he was five years old. Already he was showing exceptional talents for reading, writing, and calculating. From the age of nine, he was a boarder at Twyford College which was only three miles from his home. Despite the fact that the school was so close to his home, Freeman only went home in the school holidays and his parents never visited him in the school.

In 1936 Dyson won first place in a scholarship examination to Winchester College; he was twelve. That first place indicated significant promise and for the first time in his life, he began to realize how talented he was. He was an outstanding student across the curriculum, but proved to be brilliant at mathematics. Up until that time he had appeared as a very unusual pupil, very different from his fellow pupils. However, he now gained respect from his fellow pupils and his parents were quite bowled over by their son's success. Winchester College was important for freeman for it gave him an outstanding mathematical education. Not only did he have one of the finest mathematics teachers in the country, namely C. V. Durell, but he was in the same class as James Lighthill and the two studied advanced mathematics together such as Jordan's Cours d'Analyse. Foreign languages came easily to Dyson and when he became interested in number theory in 1938 he decided to read An introduction to the theory of numbers by Vinogradov. The fact that the book was only available in Russian at that time was apparently no problem, and he taught himself the language and translated the book into English. In the following year he read Eddington's The mathematical theory of relativity.

Dyson gained a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1941. In his first year he studied physics under Dirac and pure mathematics under Hardy and Besicovitch. During his time there he wrote several papers that were not published until 1944. Dyson had three papers published in 1943, Three identities in combinatory analysis and On the order of magnitude of the partial quotients of a continued fraction are consecutive papers in the Journal of the London Mathematical Society while A note on kurtosis appeared in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Of course these years that Dyson spent at Cambridge were in the middle of World War II and as a result many of the academics had left to undertake war work. Although not a particularly happy time for Dyson he did have a couple of good friends. As a diversion from his work, he and his friends would occupy evenings "night climbing" various architectural features of Cambridge. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Cambridge in 1945 and became a research fellow of Trinity College.

In 1947, Dyson went to the United States to study physics and spent the next two years at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, and at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, where he studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer, then director.

Career

In 1943 Freeman Dyson, despite earlier pacifist beliefs, started work as a scientist with Bomber Command where he worked on increasing mission efficiency. He worked long hours at this work but also managed to continue with his mathematics research and to read some physics texts. At the end of the war, Dyson took a job as a demonstrator at Imperial College. During this time he wrote an influential paper On simultaneous Diophantine approximations on continued fractions. He returned to Trinity College in 1946 as a fellow having written a dissertation from which he published three papers; A theorem on the densities of sets of integers (1945), A theorem in algebraic topology (1948), and On the product of four non-homogeneous linear forms (1948). Back at Cambridge, however, he began working on theoretical physics which was to become his main topic of research although, as we note below, he continued to publish papers on pure mathematics. During this time he was advised to consider moving to the United States. On advice from Peierls (Birmingham) and others, he decided to apply to work with Bethe at Cornell.

Dyson worked closely with Bethe and became deeply impressed by him (as all Bethe's students were.) In 1948 Dyson published a paper on Lamb shift in Physical Review called The Electromagnetic Shift of Energy Levels. This was the first paper he had published on physics, and it showed his remarkable ability at calculation as well as a deep physical understanding. It is clear that at this time Dyson was considered to be an extraordinarily gifted and able student. Bethe persuaded Oppenheimer to take Dyson on at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

It was from this time that Dyson's work focused on quantum electrodynamics. Something happened at this time that greatly pleased Dyson; Tomonaga in Japan had developed significant work in relativistic quantum field theory. It was not just that the work was so significant, it was that it came from an unexpected source and indicated that the United States was not the only place producing significant research in this field. Tomonaga's work differed from Schwinger's by virtue of its clarity and simplicity. Around spring in 1948, Dyson and Feynman became friends and Dyson became familiar with Feynman's methods. What characterized the two was their prodigious ability at calculation. After a long bus ride to Princeton Dyson famously figured out a very significant problem that had bothered him during the year. He now saw how to demonstrate the equivalence of Schwinger's and Feynman's theories. These ideas eventually formed the basis for his impressive work The radiation theories of Tomonaga, Schwinger, and Feynman which was published in the Physical Review in 1949.

Dyson arrived at Princeton in the Autumn of 1948. He was never quite at ease with Oppenheimer. He felt that Oppenheimer was superficial - and compared with Bethe was poor at giving guidance and support to his students. Bethe continued to be a real support to Dyson and at an influential seminar helped Dyson persuade the audience (including Oppenheimer) that Feynman's methods were the most promising way to proceed. Dyson's famous paper on the renormalization of the SSS-matrix The S matrix in quantum electrodynamics in 1949 became a very highly regarded and influential work in quantum electrodynamics.

Dyson returned to England in 1949 to become a research fellow at the University of Birmingham, working alongside Rudolph Peierls, who had played a role in developing the atomic bomb. After finishing the SSS-matrix paper, Dyson turned to meson theory where he devised a method of separating the calculation of high and low-frequency interactions. After further important publications and contributions to international conferences, in May 1950 Dyson took over Feynman's professorship at Cornell. Bethe's admiration for Dyson had by now become great. Bethe stated that Dyson was "the only man in the world" who could replace Feynman at Cornell.

In 1953 Dyson accepted a post as a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. We remarked above that Dyson continued to publish research papers on pure mathematics despite now being a physicist. For example, he published the ingenious paper Continuous functions defined on spheres in the Annals of Mathematics in 1951, A new symmetry of partitions in 1961, Mappings and symmetries of partitions in 1989, Mean square value of exponential sums related to the representation of integers as the sum of two squares (jointly with Pavel Bleher) in 1994, and The sixth Fermat number and palindromic continued fractions in 2001.

Freeman Dyson has also published several books on science/philosophy, including Disturbing the Universe (1979), Weapons and Hope (1984), Origins of Life (1986), Infinite in all Directions (1988), From Erod to Gaia (1992), Imagined Worlds (1997) and The Sun, the Genome and the Internet (1999). He has written a number of expository articles such as Mathematics in the physical sciences (1964) in Scientific American, on the role of mathematics, in particular group theory, in the physical sciences.

After 1957 Dyson worked on Project Orion, one of America’s oddest and most ambitious space ventures. Orion was to be an enormous spacecraft, with a crew of 200 scientists and engineers, driven by nuclear weapons: warheads would be ejected one after another from the spaceship and detonated. This repeated pulse of blasts would generate speeds so colossal that the spacecraft could reach Mars in two weeks, and get to Saturn, explore the planet’s moons, and get back to Earth again within seven months. Modern spacecraft launched by chemical rockets can take 12 months to reach Mars, and more than seven years to reach Saturn. The Orion project faltered under the burden of technical problems, and then was abandoned in 1965 after the partial test ban treaty that outlawed nuclear explosions in space.

In 1994 Dyson retired from his professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and was appointed professor emeritus. In 1996 Selected papers of Freeman Dyson with commentary were published by the American Mathematical Society.

Achievements

• Freeman Dyson is famed for his visionary ideas that stretched far beyond pure science. Dyson has received many honors for his outstanding contributions including election to a fellowship of the Royal Society of London in 1952. He has been awarded the Lorentz Medal by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences in 1966, the Hughes Medal by the Royal Society in 1968, the Max Planck Medal by the German Physical Society in 1969, the Enrico Fermi Award by the United States Department of Energy in 1995, and the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 2000.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Origins of Life

    (How did life on Earth originate? Did replication or metab...)

    1985
  • The Sun, The Genome, and The Internet: Tools of Scientific Revolution

    (In this visionary look into the future, Freeman Dyson arg...)

    1999
  • Disturbing The Universe

    (Spanning the years from World War II, when he was a civil...)

    1979
  • Dreams of Earth and Sky

    (In this sequel to The Scientist as Rebel (2006), Freeman ...)

    2015
  • From Eros to Gaia

    (This collection of essays and articles range across the a...)

    1992
  • Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters

    (Both recalling his life story and recounting many of the ...)

    2018
  • Advanced Quantum Mechanics

    (Renowned physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson is fam...)

    2007
  • Birds and Frogs: Selected Papers, 1990–2014

    (The present edition comprises a collection of the most in...)

    2015
  • A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe

    (Freeman Dyson’s latest book does not attempt to bring tog...)

    2007
  • Weapons and Hope

    (The book explores ways to live and survive in a nuclear a...)

    1984
  • Infinite in All Directions

    (The book is a revised version of a series of the Gifford ...)

    1988
  • Imagined Worlds

    (Imagine a world where whole epochs will pass, cultures ri...)

    1997
  • The Scientist as Rebel

    (From Galileo to today’s amateur astronomers, scientists h...)

    2006
  • Symmetry Groups in Nuclear and Particle Physics 1966

Religion

Dyson wrote widely on science and religion, which led him to him winning the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 2000. The award, which included a $600,000 cash prize, is given by the US-based Templeton Foundation to a person who "has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery or practical works." Dyson became one of a dozen physicists to have won the prize, which was first awarded in 1972 to Mother Theresa. Dyson’s Templeton citation referred to his "futurist views [that] have consistently challenged humankind to reconcile technology and social justice."

As for his own personal religious convictions, Dyson described himself as a "practicing Christian up to a point but not a believing Christian." In 2000, he told Physics World that his view of Christianity did not include the resurrection of Christ, in which he did not believe, and that he would not use the word "God" to describe a higher entity. Instead, he referred to a "world soul," adding that "I have a simple feeling that there is something there."

Dyson appeared to see no conflict between religious faith and science and pointed out in 2000 that Isaac Newton himself "had a very strong Christian faith but was also a tremendously rational person." He told Physics World that his Christianity "is about taking care of your neighbor and doing good in the world." Accepting his Templeton prize at a ceremony in Washington D.C. that same year, Dyson said "neither technology nor religion alone is powerful enough to bring social justice, but technology and religion working together might just do the job." Despite this call to action, however, Dyson shied away from campaigning roles.

Politics

Dyson was opposed to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. He supported Barack Obama in the 2008 United States presidential election. The New York Times described him as a political liberal.

Views

Much of Dyson’s early work focused on quantum electrodynamics, taking disparate ideas developed by Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and unifying them. This caused some colleagues to dub him "the midwife to the birth of quantum electrodynamics." Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for Physics for their work on quantum electrodynamics and some physicists believed that Dyson should have bagged a Nobel Prize - a sentiment that Dyson always played down.

The 1950s saw Dyson diversify his research interests, working on Project Orion, which investigated the use of nuclear power for space propulsion. He described his 15 months on Orion as "the most exciting and in many ways the happiest of my scientific life." Dyson also joined a project headed by the physicist Edward Teller – who pioneered the hydrogen bomb – that focused on the design of small nuclear reactors for research and the production of medical isotopes. More than 60 of these TRIGA (Training, Research, Isotopes, General Atomics) reactors have been installed worldwide and are still being produced.

Dyson continued to do some fundamental research and in 1967 he made a major contribution to the understanding of the inherent stability of fermionic matter. In the 1970s Dyson reduced his research activities and began to write popular-science books. He credited this shift to his Cambridge mentor Hardy, who once told Dyson: "Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books." But Dyson still kept up his research interests, and as late as 2012 published a paper on the mathematics of the prisoner’s dilemma.

Dyson’s books are known for their imaginative ideas that verge on science fiction. He had several fanciful (yet scientifically plausible) concepts named after him including the "Dyson tree," which is a hypothetical genetically modified plant that lives inside a comet. He also popularized the idea of a huge artificial structure that could be built around a star by an advanced civilization - now known as a "Dyson sphere." Searching for Dyson spheres is an active area of research, with some astronomers looking for changes in the spectral properties of stars that would be the result of such a feature.

In 2006 Dyson published The Scientist as Rebel, in which he questioned the role of human activity in global warming, putting him in conflict with the scientific consensus. Later, in another interview with Physics World (January 2008), he said that the money being spent on addressing climate change should instead be targeted at "other problems that are more urgent and more important such as poverty, infectious diseases, public education, and health." He also said that thinking about potential benefits of climate change "will not do us any harm."

Dyson believed that the science underpinning global warming is faulty and had challenged the motivations of climate scientists and activists. Referring to the climate campaigner and former United States vice-president Al Gore, Dyson once said that "his claims regarding the climate are not based on science. The scientists just go along with it. It’s nice to be important and the way to be important if you are a climate scientist is to say we’re running into a tremendous disaster. It’s a form of corruption in a way."

Dyson also publicly criticized climate scientist and activist James Hansen, who responded that Dyson was ill-informed about the science. Dyson said that his contrarian views on climate change arose from his philosophical outlook. He described himself as a humanist, rather than a "naturalist." He said that naturalists believe "nature knows best," while humanists believe that "humans have the right and the duty to reconstruct nature so that humans and the biosphere can both survive and prosper."

As a result, Dyson was a proponent of genetic engineering. He believed that it could be used to create new technologies based on living organisms - such as a tree that is engineered to have silicon in its leaves to generate electricity and is also modified to produce liquid fuel.

Quotations: "I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between mathematics and physics, which was so enormously fruitful in past centuries, has recently ended in divorce."

"As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming."

"The biggest breakthrough in the next 50 years will be the discovery of extraterrestrial life."

"I believe global warming is grossly exaggerated as a problem. It's a real problem, but it's nothing like as serious as people are led to believe. The idea that global warming is the most important problem facing the world is total nonsense and is doing a lot of harm. It distracts people's attention from much more serious problems."

"There’s very good news from the asteroids. It appears that a large fraction of them, including the big ones, are actually very rich in H2O. If we start space colonies in, say, the next 20 years, I would put my money on the asteroids."

"It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment."

Membership

Freeman Dyson was a member of the Royal Society, the French Academy of Sciences, the Accademia dei Lincei, the National Academy of Sciences, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Physical Society.

• 

  Royal Society , United Kingdom

• 

  French Academy of Sciences , France

• 

  Accademia dei Lincei , Italy

• 

  National Academy of Sciences , United States

• 

  Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities , Germany

• 

  American Academy of Arts and Sciences , United States

• 

  Russian Academy of Sciences , Russia

• 

  American Philosophical Society , United States

• 

  American Physical Society , United States

Personality

Dyson has described himself as a fox rather than a hedgehog and said scientists who jump from one project to the next have more fun.

Quotes from others about the person

• "You'll have received an application from Mr Freeman Dyson to come to work with you as a graduate student. I hope that you will accept him. Although he is only 23 he is in my view the best mathematician in England." - Geoffrey Ingram Taylor in a letter of reference to Hans Bethe
  
  "Mr Dyson is absolutely unusual in his ability and accomplishments. I can say without reservation that he is the best I have ever had or observed." - Hans Bethe in a letter of recommendation to Robert Oppenheimer
  
  "Freeman’s gift? It’s cosmic. He is able to see more interconnections between more things than almost anybody." - Ted Taylor, American theoretical physicist

Interests

• biology

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Godfrey Harold Hardy

• Politicians

  Barack Obama

• Writers

  James Joyce

Connections

In the summer of 1949 Dyson met Verena Esther Haefeli-Huber at the Institute for Advanced Study. She was a Swiss mathematician who had published her doctoral thesis Ein Dualismus als Klassifikationsprinzip in der abstrakten Gruppentheorie in the previous year. It generalized two papers by P. Hall. Dyson became engaged to Verena in the summer of 1950, and they were married later that year on 11 August. They had two children: Esther Dyson was born on 14 July 1951 in Zürich, Switzerland, and George Dyson born in Ithaca, New York in 1953. Esther went to Harvard at the age 16, where she majored in economics. An author and journalist, she is a major figure in the world of computing. George Dyson left home at age 16, moved to British Columbia where he built canoes, explored the Northwest Coast, and made his home in a tree-house. Dyson and his wife were divorced in 1958 and in the same year, on 21 November, he married Imme Jung; they had four daughters, Dorothy, Emily, Mia, and Rebecca.

Father:

George Dyson

Mother:

Mildred Lucy Atkey

Daughter:

Esther Dyson

Son:

George Dyson

Daughter:

Dorothy Dyson

Daughter:

Emily Dyson

Daughter:

Mia Dyson

Daughter:

Rebecca Dyson

ex-wife:

Verena Huber-Dyson

Wife:

Imme Jung

advisor:

Hans Bethe

Friend:

Richard Feynman

colleague:

Julius Oppenheimer

References

• Maverick Genius: The Pioneering Odyssey of Freeman Dyson
  2013
• QED and the Men Who Made It
  1994
• Proceedings of the Conference in Honour of the 90th Birthday of Freeman Dyson
  2014
• Pushing the Boundaries: A Conversation with Freeman Dyson
  2014