However, by his youth, Feynman described himself as an 'avowed atheist'.

Religion įeynman's parents were both from Jewish families, and his family went to the synagogue every Friday. Though their mother thought women lacked the capacity to understand such things, Richard encouraged Joan's interest in astronomy, and Joan eventually became an astrophysicist. Though separated by nine years, Joan and Richard were close, and they both shared a curiosity about the world. Four years later, Richard's sister Joan was born and the family moved to Far Rockaway, Queens. When Richard was five, his mother gave birth to a younger brother, Henry Phillips, who died at age four weeks. When he was in grade school, he created a home burglar alarm system while his parents were out for the day running errands. This radio repairing was probably the first job Feynman had, and during this time he showed early signs of an aptitude for his later career in theoretical physics, when he would analyze the issues theoretically and arrive at the solutions.

As a child, he had a talent for engineering, maintained an experimental laboratory in his home, and delighted in repairing radios. From his mother, he gained the sense of humor that he had throughout his life. The young Feynman was heavily influenced by his father, who encouraged him to ask questions to challenge orthodox thinking, and who was always ready to teach Feynman something new. As an adult, he spoke with a New York accent strong enough to be perceived as an affectation or exaggeration, so much so that his friends Wolfgang Pauli and Hans Bethe once commented that Feynman spoke like a 'bum'. Feynman was a late talker and did not speak until after his third birthday. She trained as a primary school teacher but married Melville in 1917, before taking up a profession. Lucille's father had emigrated from Poland, and her mother also came from a family of Polish immigrants. Feynman's mother was born in the United States into a Jewish family.

Feynman's father was born into a Jewish family in Minsk, Russian Empire, and emigrated with his parents to the United States at the age of five. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?, and books written about him such as Tuva or Bust! by Ralph Leighton and the biography Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick.įeynman was born on May 11, 1918, in New York City, to Lucille ( née Phillips 1895–1981), a homemaker, and Melville Arthur Feynman (1890–1946), a sales manager. Feynman also became known through his autobiographical books Surely You're Joking, Mr. Tolman professorship in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology.įeynman was a keen popularizer of physics through both books and lectures, including a 1959 talk on top-down nanotechnology called There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom and the three-volume publication of his undergraduate lectures, The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

Along with his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing and introducing the concept of nanotechnology. He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II and became known to a wide public in the 1980s as a member of the Rogers Commission, the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal Physics World, he was ranked the seventh-greatest physicist of all time. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga.įeynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. Richard Phillips Feynman ( / ˈ f aɪ n m ə n/ – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as his work in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model.

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