Nobel foundation · Public domain

Julian Schwinger shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics with Richard Feynman and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga for independently working out quantum electrodynamics, the theory of how light and matter interact — Schwinger's route ran through a dense, mathematically rigorous formalism rather than Feynman's diagrams, and he renormalized QED to remove its infinities. He went on to build the first electroweak model, unifying two of the four fundamental forces years before it became mainstream, and shared the inaugural Albert Einstein Award with Kurt Gödel.