Richard P. Feynman

Richard P. Feynman
May 11th, 1918 to February 15th, 1988

Richard P(hillips) 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 the Nobel Prize in Physics for work in quantum electrodynamics.

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

by

James Gleick

ISBN-10: 0679747044
ISBN-13: 978-0679747048

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