In 1943, the same year he finished his doctorate, Feynman was recruited to join the Manhattan Project’s bomb design team in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He went on to pursue a PhD in Princeton’s physics department under John Wheeler. A look inside Feynman’s calculus notebookįeynman grew up in Far Rockaway, New York, and attended college at MIT, a natural choice for a young man who was so impatient to learn calculus he decided to teach himself.Feynman: The development of the space-time view of quantum electrodynamics.Feynman: An outsider’s inside view of the Challenger inquiry.Read more about Richard Feynman in the Physics Today archives. It also led him into trouble with colleagues, friends, and family. Feynman’s love of jokes and verbal swordplay made him an engaging figure at parties and in the pages of his memoirs. He’s known for pulling pranks at Los Alamos, trying his hand at a variety of quirky hobbies, and taking road trips in a Dodge Tradesman Maxivan painted with his famous Feynman diagrams.
Yet Feynman’s posthumous reputation rests not just on his aptitude for physics but also on his playful personality. In polls ranking history’s greatest physicists, Feynman routinely finishes near the top. He’s also remembered for his ability to captivate a lecture hall-the Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964) are still in print. That honor alone would have been enough to guarantee him a place in the history of science. Richard Phillips Feynman, who was born 100 years ago today, made his mark with contributions to particle physics, superfluidity, and quantum electrodynamics-the last of which won him the 1965 Nobel Prize. Richard Feynman educates and entertains his audience during a coffee hour at Caltech in 1964.
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