Richard Feynman

As a small child, I had always been interested in learning about Physics. That is probably why one of my childhood heroes was Richard P. Feynman. For my 12th birthday, my dad got me his book and I read it that very night. I even had a small poster of him playing the bongos in my room. That is why I chose to briefly write about his life here.

Born to middle-class parents in 1918, in Queens NY, Feynman showed an interest in engineering at an early age. It is said that he was repairing radios in grade school and that he created a home burglar alarm system. From an early age he had also accepted atheism and though both his parents were Jewish, he did not believe in Judaism. In high school, he quickly moved on to the highest math classes and an IQ test estimated his high school IQ at 125 ("high but merely respectable"). He scored the highest scores by a large margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam competition. He had taught himself basic calculus, infinite series, trigonometry and some advanced algebra by 15. As a senior in High School, he won the NYU math competition. He was rejected by Colombia but he was accepted into MIT. He began studying Mathematics but switched to Electrical Engineering, and later switched again to Physics.

He published two papers as an undergraduate. One was titled "The Scattering of Cosmic Rays by the Stars of a Galaxy" and the other was "Forces in Molecules", which gave rise to the Hellmann-Feynman Theorem. He got his graduate degree from Princeton University, after receiving a perfect score on the physics entrance exam and an almost perfect score on the Math exam. Some of the attendees at his first seminar were Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, and Von Neumann. His graduate thesis was "The Principle of Least Action in Quantum Mechanics". Arguably his most significant work, it also introduces a new notation called a Feynman Diagram.

Even before he graduated fully from Princeton, he was involved in the Manhatten Project, where he met and connected with numerous big shots in Physics (Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, Robert Wilson, Niels Bohr, Klaus Fuchs). In this time he developed: the Bethe-Feynman formula (for determining the yield of a nuclear bomb),  the Isotron (to isolate uranium),  a new algorithm to calculate logarithms more quickly. He also spent a lot of his free time cracking combination lock for fun and pranking his fellow scientists. His High School sweetheart, whom he planned to marry, died at this time too. I found it interesting that although he did so much tremendous work in this time, his wage of $300 per month was half of what he needed to make a living.

Because of his involvement in the Manhattan Project, Feynman was fired from Cornell, where he had been hired as a professor. During this time he was believed to be clinically depressed and burned out (partially due to the death of his father). In the time he did work at Cornell he explored many, many branches of Quantum Physics, yet he was said to be restless. He rarely slept in the same dorm and liked to have short-term relationships with undergraduates, hire prostitutes, or sleep with the wives of friends. He did receive job offers at UCLA and UC Berkeley but ended up working at CalTech instead, after spending a lot of time in Rio de Janeiro. In this period of his life, he became an enthusiastic bongo player, and he also wrote "The Feynman Lectures on Physics" along with several biographies (one of which was the one my dad got me and that got me excited about his life). He continued his fruitful study when in 1965 he shared the Nobel Prize with Schwinger and Tomonaga for their work on Quantum Electrodynamics.

Sadly he passed away at the age of 69 due to kidney failure and was buried at the Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena. His last words were "I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring". He has undoubtedly done more for science than most people ever will.