Richard Feynman

In a house in Far Rockaway, Queens, a boy took apart problems the way other children took apart toys. Richard Phillips Feynman, born in New York City on May 11, 1918, grew up in a Jewish family shaped by immigration, work, argument, and curiosity. His father, Melville, encouraged him to ask questions and challenge orthodox thinking; his mother, Lucille, gave him the sense of humor that stayed with him all his life. As a child, Feynman kept an experimental laboratory at home, repaired radios, and even built a burglar alarm while his parents were out running errands.

That early habit of testing things for himself became central to the way he thought. Feynman was a late talker, but once he found mathematics, he moved fast. At Far Rockaway High School he was quickly promoted to a higher math class, and by fifteen he had taught himself trigonometry, advanced algebra, infinite series, analytic geometry, and both differential and integral calculus. Before college, he was already experimenting with ideas such as the half-derivative and inventing his own notation. His sister Joan shared his curiosity about the world; Richard encouraged her interest in astronomy, and she later became an astrophysicist.

Feynman became one of the most distinctive American theoretical physicists of the twentieth century. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, or QED, with consequences for the physics of elementary particles. He is also known for the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, his work on the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, and the parton model. His pictorial method for describing the behavior of subatomic particles became known as Feynman diagrams and remains widely used.

His career also touched the largest public events of modern science and technology. During World War II, he assisted in the development of the atomic bomb. Later, as the Richard C. Tolman professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, he became a vivid teacher and public explainer. In the 1980s, he was known to a much wider audience as a member of the Rogers Commission, the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. He has also been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing and introducing the concept of nanotechnology.

Feynman’s gift was not only in doing physics, but in making thinking feel alive. His 1959 talk “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” his undergraduate The Feynman Lectures on Physics, and later lectures collected as The Character of Physical Law and QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter brought difficult ideas to broad audiences. Anecdote collections such as Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think? added to the public image of a brilliant, funny, restless mind. His words still resonate because they carry that same demand for honesty and curiosity: “Be teachable, you’re not always right.”