A Critical History of Renormalization

Abstract

The history of renormalization is reviewed with a critical eye, starting with Lorentz's theory of radiation damping, through perturbative QED with Dyson, Gell-Mann & Low, and others, to Wilson's formulation and Polchinski's functional equation, and applications to "triviality", and dark energy in cosmology.

Comments: To the memory of Kenneth G. Wilson (1936--2013)