Editing Freeman Dyson (section)

=== Early life ===
Dyson was born on 15 December 1923, in [[Crowthorne]] in [[Berkshire]], [[England]].<ref name=rsbm/> He was the son of Mildred ({{née|Atkey}}) and the composer [[George Dyson (composer)|George Dyson]], who was later knighted. His mother had a law degree, and after Dyson was born she worked as a social worker.{{sfn|Stocke|2008}} Dyson had one sibling, his older sister, Alice, who remembered him as a boy surrounded by encyclopedias and always calculating on sheets of paper.{{sfn|Finkbeiner|2013}} At the age of four he tried to calculate the number of atoms in the Sun.{{sfn|Dyson|Rītups|2016}} As a child, he showed an interest in large numbers and in the [[Solar System]], and was strongly influenced by the 1937 book ''[[Men of Mathematics]]'' by [[Eric Temple Bell]].{{sfn|Lin|2014}} Politically, Dyson said he was "brought up as a socialist".{{sfn|Ghodsee|2015|p=5}}

From 1936 to 1941 Dyson was a scholar at [[Winchester College]], where his father was Director of Music.<ref name=rsbm/> At the age of 17 he studied pure mathematics with [[Abram Besicovitch]] as his tutor<ref name=MathsatCambs /> at [[Trinity College, Cambridge]], where he won a scholarship at age 15. During this stay, Dyson also practised [[night climbing]] on the university buildings,{{sfn|Schweber|1994|p=486}} and once walked from [[Cambridge]] to [[London]] in a day with his friend Oscar Hahn, nephew of [[Kurt Hahn]], who was a wheelchair user due to [[polio]].{{sfn|Schweber|1994|p=487}}

At the age of 19 he was assigned to war work in the [[Operations research#Second World War|Operational Research Section]] (ORS) of [[RAF Bomber Command]], where he developed analytical methods for calculating the ideal density for bomber formations to help the [[Royal Air Force]] bomb German targets during the [[Second World War]].{{sfn|Dyson|2006a}}{{sfn|Brower|2010}} After the war, Dyson was readmitted to Trinity College, where he obtained a [[Bachelor of Arts|BA]] degree in mathematics.{{sfn|Aharony|Feder|1989|p=66}}<ref name=ias.edu /> From 1946 to 1949 he was a [[fellow]] of his college, occupying rooms just below those of the philosopher [[Ludwig Wittgenstein]], who resigned his professorship in 1947.{{sfn|Dyson|2012}}

In 1947 Dyson published two papers in [[number theory]].{{sfn|Dyson|1947|pp= 225-240}}{{sfn|Dyson|1946|pp=409-420}} Friends and colleagues described him as shy and self-effacing, with a contrarian streak that his friends found refreshing but intellectual opponents found exasperating.<ref name=rsbm/> "I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice", [[Steven Weinberg]] said of him. His friend the neurologist and author [[Oliver Sacks]] said: "A favourite word of Freeman's about doing science and being creative is the word 'subversive'. He feels it's rather important not only to be not orthodox, but to be subversive, and he's done that all his life."{{sfn|Dawidoff|2009}}