, usually cited as Sin-Itiro Tomonaga in English, was a Japanese

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...

, influential in the development of

quantum electrodynamics In particle physics, quantum electrodynamics (QED) is the relativistic quantum field theory of electrodynamics. In essence, it describes how light and matter interact and is the first theory where full agreement between quantum mechanics and spec ...

, work for which he was jointly awarded the

Nobel Prize in Physics ) , image = Nobel Prize.png , alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFR•" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NAT•" then " ...

in 1965 along with

Richard Feynman Richard Phillips Feynman (; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfl ...

and Julian Schwinger.

Biography

Tomonaga was born in

Tokyo Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.46 ...

in 1906. He was the second child and eldest son of a Japanese

philosopher A philosopher is a person who practices or investigates philosophy. The term ''philosopher'' comes from the grc, φιλόσοφος, , translit=philosophos, meaning 'lover of wisdom'. The coining of the term has been attributed to the Greek th ...

Tomonaga Sanjūrō was a Japanese academic and esteemed professor emeritus of medieval, renaissance, early modern, and Kantian philosophy at the University of Kyoto during the early 20th century. He was one of the leading thinkers of the Kyoto School. His son, S ...

. He entered the Kyoto Imperial University in 1926.

Hideki Yukawa was a Japanese theoretical physicist and the first Japanese Nobel laureate for his prediction of the pi meson, or pion. Biography He was born as Hideki Ogawa in Tokyo and grew up in Kyoto with two older brothers, two older sisters, and two yo ...

, also a

Nobel laureate The Nobel Prizes ( sv, Nobelpriset, no, Nobelprisen) are awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Academy, the Karolinska Institutet, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee to individuals and organizations who make o ...

, was one of his classmates during

undergraduate Undergraduate education is education conducted after secondary education and before postgraduate education. It typically includes all postsecondary programs up to the level of a bachelor's degree. For example, in the United States, an entry-le ...

school. During graduate school at the same university, he worked as an assistant in the university for three years. In 1931, after graduate school, he joined Nishina's group in RIKEN. In 1937, while working at

Leipzig University Leipzig University (german: Universität Leipzig), in Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, is one of the world's oldest universities and the second-oldest university (by consecutive years of existence) in Germany. The university was founded on 2 December ...

(

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as ...

), he collaborated with the research group of

Werner Heisenberg Werner Karl Heisenberg () (5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976) was a German theoretical physicist and one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics. He published his work in 1925 in a Über quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematis ...

. Two years later, he returned to Japan due to the outbreak of the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...

, but finished his doctoral degree (Dissertation PhD from

University of Tokyo , abbreviated as or UTokyo, is a public research university located in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Established in 1877, the university was the first Imperial University and is currently a Top Type university of the Top Global University Project b ...

) on the study of

nuclear Nuclear may refer to: Physics Relating to the nucleus of the atom: *Nuclear engineering *Nuclear physics *Nuclear power *Nuclear reactor *Nuclear weapon *Nuclear medicine *Radiation therapy *Nuclear warfare Mathematics *Nuclear space *Nuclear ...

materials with his thesis on work he had done while in Leipzig. In Japan, he was appointed to a professorship in the Tokyo University of Education (a forerunner of

Tsukuba University is a public research university located in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan. It is a top 10 Designated National University, and was ranked Type A by the Japanese government as part of the Top Global University Project. The university has 28 college ...

). During the war he studied the

magnetron The cavity magnetron is a high-power vacuum tube used in early radar systems and currently in microwave ovens and linear particle accelerators. It generates microwaves using the interaction of a stream of electrons with a magnetic field while ...

meson In particle physics, a meson ( or ) is a type of hadronic subatomic particle composed of an equal number of quarks and antiquarks, usually one of each, bound together by the strong interaction. Because mesons are composed of quark subparticles, ...

theory, and his super-many-time theory. In 1948, he and his students re-examined a 1939 paper by

Sidney Dancoff Sidney Michael Dancoff (September 27, 1913 in Philadelphia – August 15, 1951 in Urbana, Illinois) was an American theoretical physicist best known for the Tamm–Dancoff approximation method and for nearly developing a renormalization method for ...

that attempted, but failed, to show that the infinite quantities that arise in QED can be canceled with each other. Tomonaga applied his super-many-time theory and a relativistic method based on the non-relativistic method of

Wolfgang Pauli Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (; ; 25 April 1900 – 15 December 1958) was an Austrian theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics. In 1945, after having been nominated by Albert Einstein, Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics ...

and Fierz to greatly speed up and clarify the calculations. Then he and his students found that Dancoff had overlooked one term in the perturbation series. With this term, the theory gave finite results; thus Tomonaga discovered the

renormalization Renormalization is a collection of techniques in quantum field theory, the statistical mechanics of fields, and the theory of self-similar geometric structures, that are used to treat infinities arising in calculated quantities by altering va ...

method independently of Julian Schwinger and calculated physical quantities such as the

Lamb shift In physics, the Lamb shift, named after Willis Lamb, is a difference in energy between two energy levels 2''S''1/2 and 2''P''1/2 (in term symbol notation) of the hydrogen atom which was not predicted by the Dirac equation, according to which th ...

at the same time. In 1949, he was invited by Robert Oppenheimer to work at the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent schola ...

Princeton Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nin ...

. He studied a many-body problem on the collective oscillations of a quantum-mechanical system. In the following year, he returned to Japan and proposed the

Tomonaga–Luttinger liquid A Luttinger liquid, or Tomonaga–Luttinger liquid, is a theoretical model describing interacting electrons (or other fermions) in a one-dimensional conductor (e.g. quantum wires such as carbon nanotubes). Such a model is necessary as the commonl ...

. In 1955, he took the leadership in establishing the Institute for Nuclear Study,

. In 1965, he was awarded the

, with Julian Schwinger and

Richard P. Feynman Richard Phillips Feynman (; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superflu ...

, for the study of QED, specifically for the discovery of the

method. He died of throat cancer in

in 1979. Tomonaga was married in 1940 to Ryōko Sekiguchi. They had two sons and one daughter. He was awarded the Order of Culture in 1952, and the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun in 1976. In recognition of three

Nobel laureates The Nobel Prizes ( sv, Nobelpriset, no, Nobelprisen) are awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Academy, the Karolinska Institutet, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee to individuals and organizations who make ou ...

' contributions, the bronze statues of Shin'ichirō Tomonaga,

Leo Esaki Reona Esaki (江崎玲於奈 ''Esaki Reona'', born March 12, 1925), also known as Leo Esaki, is a Japanese physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 with Ivar Giaever and Brian David Josephson for his work in electron tunneling i ...

, and Makoto Kobayashi was set up in the Central Park of Azuma 2 in Tsukuba City in 2015.

Recognition

*1946 –

Asahi Prize The , established in 1929, is an award presented by the Japanese newspaper ''Asahi Shimbun'' and Asahi Shimbun Foundation to honor individuals and groups that have made outstanding accomplishments in the fields of arts and academics and have greatl ...

*1948 – Japan Academy Prize *1951 – Member of the

Japan Academy The Japan Academy ( Japanese: 日本学士院, ''Nihon Gakushiin'') is an honorary organisation and science academy founded in 1879 to bring together leading Japanese scholars with distinguished records of scientific achievements. The Academy is ...

*1952 –

Order of Culture The is a Japanese order, established on February 11, 1937. The order has one class only, and may be awarded to men and women for contributions to Japan's art, literature, science, technology, or anything related to culture in general; recipient ...

*1964 –

Lomonosov Gold Medal The Lomonosov Gold Medal (russian: Большая золотая медаль имени М. В. Ломоносова ''Bol'shaya zolotaya medal' imeni M. V. Lomonosova''), named after Russian scientist and polymath Mikhail Lomonosov, is awarded ...

*1965 –

*1965 – elected to the United States

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nat ...

*1966 – elected to the

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...

*1967 – Grand Cordon of the

Order of the Rising Sun The is a Japanese order, established in 1875 by Emperor Meiji. The Order was the first national decoration awarded by the Japanese government, created on 10 April 1875 by decree of the Council of State. The badge features rays of sunlight f ...

*1975 – elected to the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

Selected publications

Books

Articles

* Tomonaga, S. "On a Relativistically Invariant Formulation of the Quantum Theory of Wave Fields." '' Prog. Theor. Phys.'' 1, 27–42 (1946). * Koba, Z., Tati, T. and Tomonaga, S. "On a Relativistically Invariant Formulation of the Quantum Theory of Wave Fields. II." ''Prog. Theor. Phys.'' 2, 101–116 (1947). * Koba, Z., Tati, T. and Tomonaga, S. "On a Relativistically Invariant Formulation of the Quantum Theory of Wave Fields. III." ''Prog. Theor. Phys.'' 2, 198–208 (1947). * Kanesawa, S. and Tomonaga, S. "On a Relativistically Invariant Formulation of the Quantum Theory of Wave Fields. IV." ''Prog. Theor. Phys.'' 3, 1–13 (1948). * Kanesawa, S. and Tomonaga, S. "On a Relativistically Invariant Formulation of the Quantum Theory of Wave Fields. V." ''Prog. Theor. Phys.'' 3, 101–113 (1948). * Koba, Z. and Tomonaga, S. "On Radiation Reactions in Collision Processes. I." ''Prog. Theor. Phys.'' 3, 290–303 (1948). * Tomonaga, S. and Oppenheimer, J. R. "On Infinite Field Reactions in Quantum Field Theory." ''Phys. Rev.'' 74, 224–225 (1948).

References

External links

* including the Nobel Lecture, May 6, 1966 ''Development of Quantum Electrodynamics''

{{DEFAULTSORT:Tomonaga, Shinichiro 1906 births 1979 deaths Japanese physicists Kyoto University alumni Nobel laureates in Physics Japanese Nobel laureates Academic staff of Leipzig University Recipients of the Order of Culture Theoretical physicists Foreign Members of the USSR Academy of Sciences Foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences Institute for Advanced Study visiting scholars Deaths from throat cancer Deaths from cancer in Japan Particle physicists Riken personnel Quantum physicists Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Members of the American Philosophical Society