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Birth of Polkinghorne
John Charlton Polkinghorne was born to Dorothy Charlton and George Polkinghorne on October 16th, 1930. The area he was born into was called Weston, a small seaside town within England. John was the third, and youngest, child born into the Polkinghorne household. His elder brother was 9 years his senior, and his sister died 6 months before his own birth. His father was the primary bread winner and made money as a postman. -
Childhood 1937-1941
John attended the local primary school in his area but struggled heavily in reading and writing. He received private schooling until he was 7. After his private schooling proved unnecessary, John attended both the local Quaker run school until he was 11 and Elmhurst Grammar School thereafter. -
Death of Peter
Peter, John's brother, enlisted in the British Royal Air Force at the start of world war 2. He flew on a myriad of missions and campaigns but ultimately died in 1942 on a mission in the northern Atlantic. Is is unknown how this affected his family -
Childhood 1945-1948
Polkinghorne's father was promoted in 1945. This promotion prompted the family to move to Ely, England where John attended the Perse school in Cambridge. It was there that he excelled in mathematics. While at Cambridge he studied pure mathematics, applied mathematics, and physics. Though his hard work he was awarded a scholarship to Trinity College in 1948. -
Trinity College
Polkinghorne started his collegial career at Trinity College, Cambridge, in October of 1949. His pure mathematics tutor was Besicovitch, a famous mathematical analyzer from Russia. Nicholas Kemmer, a nuclear physicist from Russia, tutored him in applied mathematics. By his third year of college, he was specializing in quantum mechanics. -
S Matrix
In 1954 he published his first famous work: An identity for the S matrix for a finite time interval, Renormalization of the transformation operators of quantum electrodynamics, and Normal products of Heisenberg operators -
Other Famous Works
"-in 1955 he published Temporally ordered graphs and bound state equations and On the classification of fundamental particles. Then he published General dispersion relations in 1956 and Causal products in quantum field theory in the following year. Also in a joint paper in 1957 he published Cauchy's problem in quantum field theory which explores the relation between the classical and quantum versions of field theories." (O'Connor 2008.) -
Marriage
He married his longtime friend, Ruth Martin, in 1955 (three years after they graduated.) -
Lecturer in Scotland
In 1956 he was given an offer of a lectureship in theoretical physics in Edinburgh, Scotland. He excitedly accepted the position and stood there for several years and through the birth of his first child, Peter. -
Lecturer in Cambridge
While Polkinghorne loved working in Edinburgh, he was offered a much more exciting position back at his old college in Cambridge. He took up the position in 1958. -
Becoming a minister
Religion was always an important part of his life since he was a child. In 1977 he felt he had already done everything that he was ever going to do in the field of science and became an ordained minister in 1978 after completing his training. He resigned from his position at Cambridge the same year after publishing countless books, articles, and helping discover the Quark! -
Sources Cited
O'Connor, J J, and E F Robertson. “John Polkinghorne - Biography.” Maths History, School of Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland, July 2008, mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Polkinghorne/. -
Death
He died March 21st, 2021.