Richard Feynman

Melville Feynman sold uniforms and raised his son to ask what a thing did rather than what it was called. Richard did not talk until after his third birthday, then taught himself trigonometry, advanced algebra, infinite series, analytic geometry and both halves of calculus by 15, inventing his own notation as he went. A high-school test put his IQ at 125, which his sister Joan beat by a point. Columbia rejected him under its quota on Jewish admissions. He went to MIT, took his degree in 1939, was named a Putnam Fellow, and scored perfectly on Princeton's graduate physics exam — where the department head wrote to a colleague asking whether Feynman was Jewish, since they had no rule against them but had to keep the proportion down.

At Los Alamos he ran the room of human computers, worked out with Hans Bethe the formula for predicting a weapon's yield, and watched Trinity through a truck windshield with no dark glasses, on the theory that the glass would stop the ultraviolet. Afterward, at Cornell and then Caltech, he rebuilt quantum electrodynamics from the path integral upward and drew the pictures — lines and vertices for particles meeting and parting — that made the arithmetic possible. The 1948 debut went badly, with Bohr, Dirac and Teller objecting from the floor. Freeman Dyson then showed that his method, Schwinger's and Tomonaga's were one theory. The three shared the 1965 Nobel Prize. The diagrams are on every blackboard in the field.

His second wife, Mary Louise Bell, was granted a divorce in 1956 on grounds of extreme cruelty, and the FBI wrote the complaint into its file: he did calculus in his head from the moment he woke, his one hobby was the drums, and when she interrupted either he choked her, threw things and broke the furniture. His own bestselling memoir describes holding meetings in strip clubs, hiring a student as a nude model, and posing as an undergraduate to get younger women into bed. Students picketed him at Caltech in 1968 and again in 1972 over the jokes about lady drivers. The account does not close cleanly: in 1977 he filed with the EEOC for Jenijoy La Belle, Caltech's first woman professor, who had been refused tenure and underpaid, and she won.

Two cancers found him — a liposarcoma in 1978 that had crushed a kidney and his spleen, and Waldenström macroglobulinemia in 1986, with operations in 1986 and 1987. Between them came the Challenger commission, where he dropped a piece of O-ring into a glass of ice water on live television and wrote in his own appendix to the report that reality has to take precedence over public relations, because nature cannot be fooled. He declined the dialysis that might have bought a few months. His last recorded words, on the coma he kept surfacing from, were that dying was boring. He had spent years trying to get to Tuva. The Soviet permission arrived the day after he died.

Richard Feynman's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Principle of Least Action in Quantum Mechanics article
  The Princeton thesis that became the path integral formulation 1942
• Space-Time Approach to Quantum Electrodynamics article
  Where the diagrams and the propagator reached print 1949
• There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom speech
  The talk that nanotechnology later claimed as its founding document 1959
• The Feynman Lectures on Physics book
  Three years of undergraduate teaching that intimidated the undergraduates and sold forever 1964
• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! book
  Taped with Ralph Leighton, a bestseller, and the source of most of the trouble 1985
• Appendix F to the Rogers Commission Report article
  His dissent on shuttle risk, printed as an appendix because it would not fit the body 1986

• 1939 aged ~21 Graduates from MIT and is named a Putnam Fellow He scored perfectly on Princeton's graduate physics exam and poorly on its history and English.
• June 29, 1942 aged 24 Marries Arline Greenbaum, who has active tuberculosis City office on Staten Island, no family, two strangers as witnesses, and a kiss on the cheek.
• June 16, 1945 aged 27 Arline dies in Albuquerque He drove over and sat with her, then went back to work on the bomb.
• October 17, 1946 aged 28 Writes Arline a letter and seals it It was opened after his death. Please excuse my not mailing this, it ends, but I don't know your new address.
• 1948 aged ~30 Presents the diagrams at Pocono and is shouted down Dirac, Teller and Bohr all objected. Freeman Dyson made the case for him a year later.
• 1965 aged ~47 Shares the Nobel Prize in Physics for quantum electrodynamics
• 1977 aged ~59 Wins an EEOC case for Caltech's first woman professor Jenijoy La Belle had been denied tenure and paid less than the men. She got tenure in 1979.
• 1986 aged ~68 Puts an O-ring in ice water on live television The chairman of the commission told Neil Armstrong that Feynman was becoming a pain.
• February 15, 1988 aged 69 Dies at UCLA Medical Center after refusing dialysis

• J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–1967
  Theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project and became known as the father of the atomic bomb. made him a group leader at Los Alamos
• Murray Gell-Mann 1929–2019
  Theoretical physicist who discovered quarks and won the Nobel Prize for his standard model of particle physics. rival down the Caltech corridor
• Edward Teller 1908–2003
  Physicist and advocate of the hydrogen bomb whose work and policy influence shaped Cold War science and defense. objected to the diagrams in 1948
• Carl Sagan 1934–1996
  Astronomer and science communicator who brought cosmology to millions through Cosmos and popular books. inherited the job of explaining
• Neil deGrasse Tyson b. 1958
  Astrophysicist and science communicator who has made cosmology accessible to millions through television. later custodian of the same audience