Richard P. Feynman
American theoretical physicist
Richard P. Feynman was an American theoretical physicist and a Nobel Prize winner in 1965. He also shared physics with general audiences through books and lectures.
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American Born 1918 in Far Rockaway, United States Died 1988
About Richard P. Feynman
Richard P. Feynman was born in 1918 and raised in Far Rockaway, New York. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Princeton, then worked at Los Alamos on the atomic bomb during World War II. He later taught at Cornell, and from 1951 at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) until his death in 1988. The 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics went to him jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga, for their work on quantum electrodynamics. He also devised a way of drawing the mathematics of subatomic particle behavior, now called Feynman diagrams, which remain in wide use. In 1986 he joined the Rogers Commission, which looked into the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Feynman also enjoyed popularizing physics, in both books and lectures. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! gathers stories from his life, compiled by Ralph Leighton.