Feynman, Richard Phillips 1918-88
US physicist and Nobel Prize winner

Born in New York City, he studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Princeton, where he received his PhD. Overcoming moral doubts, he worked on the Manhattan atomic bomb project at Los Alamos and after World War II he was appointed professor at Cornell University. There he worked with Hans Bethe on quantum electrodynamics, the application of quantum theory to interactions between electromagnetic radiation and particles. He devised his own pictorial way of describing quantum processes, the 'path integral approach', which has proved to be a very powerful theoretical tool. Using this he further developed quantum electrodynamics and introduced 'Feynman diagrams', which provide a pictorial representation of particle interactions. For his work on quantum electrodynamics he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1965 together with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. The most successful and accurate physical theory ever developed, quantum electrodynamics is the model on which other quantum field theories are based. Working with Murray Gell-Mann at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), he created the V-A model of weak interactions which can describe parity conservation violation. He also studied how deep inelastic scattering can reveal the structure of protons and investigated the properties of liquid helium.

Bibliography: James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992)