Richard Phillips Feynman

Richard Phillips Feynman , 1918-88, American physicist, b. New York City, B.S. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1939, Ph.D. Princeton, 1942. From 1942 to 1945 he worked on the development of the atomic bomb. He taught (1945-50) at Cornell Univ. and became professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology in 1950. The Feynman diagram, proposed by him in 1949, shows the track of a particle in space and time and provides a clear means of describing particle interactions. Feynman also made significant contributions to the theories of superfluidity and quarks. In 1957 he and Murray Gell-Mann proposed the theory of weak nuclear force . Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics with Shinichiro Tomonaga and J. S. Schwinger for work leading to the establishment of the modern theory of quantum electrodynamics . He wrote the influential Feynman Lectures on Physics (commemorative issue, 3 vol., 1990), Feynman Lectures on Gravitation (1994), and Feynman Lectures on Computation (1996).

Bibliography: See his Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985), What Do You Care What Other People Think? (1988), and The Meaning of It All (1998); Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman (2005), ed. by M. Feynman; biography by J. Gleick (1993); J. Mehra, The Beat of a Different Drum (1994); D. L. Goodstein and J. R. Goodstein, Feynman's Lost Lecture (1996); J. Gribbin and M. Gribbin, Richard Feynman (1997); G. J. Milburn, The Feynman Processor (1999).

Feynman, Richard Phillips (1918–88) US theoretical physicist. He worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. An inspiring teacher and orator, Feynman was professor of theoretical physics (1950–88) at the California Institute of Technology. In 1949, he introduced a graphic technique (Feynman diagrams) for illustrating the electromagnetic interactions between elementary particles. In 1957, Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann proposed the theory of weak nuclear force. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in physics for his part in the development of quantum electrodynamics (QED). In 1986, he was a member of the committee that investigated the Challenger space-shuttle disaster.