Tomonaga was born inTokyo in 1906. He was the second child and eldest son of a Japanesephilosopher,Tomonaga Sanjūrō. He entered theKyoto Imperial University in 1926.Hideki Yukawa, also aNobel laureate, was one of his classmates duringundergraduate 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 joinedNishina's group inRIKEN. In 1937, while working atLeipzig University (Leipzig), he collaborated with the research group ofWerner Heisenberg. Two years later, he returned to Japan due to the outbreak of theSecond World War, but finished his doctoral degree (Dissertation PhD fromUniversity of Tokyo) on the study ofnuclear materials with his thesis on work he had done while in Leipzig.[4]
In Japan, he was appointed to a professorship in the Tokyo University of Education (a forerunner ofTsukuba University). During the war he studied themagnetron,meson theory, and hissuper-many-time theory. In 1948, he and his students re-examined a 1939 paper bySidney Dancoff that attempted, but failed, to show that the infinite quantities that arise inquantum electrodynamics (QED) can be canceled with each other. Tomonaga applied his super-many-time theory and a relativistic method based on the non-relativistic method ofWolfgang Pauli andFierz to greatly speed up and clarify the calculations. Then he and his students found that Dancoff had overlooked one term in theperturbation series. With this term, the theory gave finite results; thus Tomonaga discovered therenormalization method independently ofJulian Schwinger and calculated physical quantities such as theLamb shift at the same time.
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.
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. andOppenheimer, J. R. "On Infinite Field Reactions in Quantum Field Theory."Phys. Rev.74, 224–225 (1948).
^For this spelling see:Shigeru Nakayama, Kunio Gotō, Hitoshi Yoshioka (eds.),A Social History of Science and Technology in Contemporary Japan: Road to self-reliance 1952-1959, Trans Pacific Press, 2005, p. 723.
