Richard P. FeynmanDied 15 Feb 1988 at age 69 (born 11 May 1918). Richard Philips Feynman was an American theoretical physicist who was probably the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in his field in the post-WW II era. By age 15, he had mastered calculus. He took every physics course at MIT. His lifelong interest was in subatomic physics. In 1942, he went to Los Alamos where Hans Bethe made the 24 year old Feynman a group leader in the theoretical division, to work on estimating how much uranium would be needed to achieve critical mass for the Manhattan (atomic bomb) Project. After the war, he developed Feynman Diagrams, a simple notation to describe the complex behavior of subatomic particles. In 1965, he shared (with Julian Schwinger and Shin-ichiro Tomonaga) the Nobel Prize in Physics for work in quantum electrodynamics. |
