An early attempt at developign this technique came from Abraham and Lorenz's attempts to create a classical theory of the self-interacting electron. This technique exists in several varieties, including "bare," as well as a variety that employs Feynman diagrams with counterterms and is known as the 
An early attempt at developign this technique came from Abraham and Lorenz's attempts to create a classical theory of the self-interacting electron. This technique exists in several varieties, including "bare," as well as a variety that employs Feynman diagrams with counterterms and is known as the perturbation varity, and one scheme for setting the counterterms is known as the minimal subtraction scheme. Ken Wilson applied this concept to statistical mechanics to develop his theory of second order phase transitions, and Gerard t'Hooft showed that gauge theories have this property by employing a related technique called regularization. For ten points, identify this operation which in quantum field theories is used to remove singularities.
An early attempt at developign this technique came from Abraham and Lorenz's attempts to create a classical theory of the self-interacting electron.
renormalization