Richard Feynman
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.030962
It’s the birthday of Richard Feynman, who was born in 1918 in Queens, New York. Feynman earned a PhD in physics in 1942 from Princeton University, where he was recruited to join the Manhattan Project. After the war, he joined Hans Bethe at Cornell University. There, he developed his path-integral and diagrammatic approaches to calculating how charged quantum particles behave in an electromagnetic field. For his work in developing quantum electrodynamics, he shared the 1965 Nobel physics prize with Julian Schwinger and Shinichiro Tomonaga. Besides those and other contributions to theoretical physics, Feynman was an effective and enthusiastic teacher. His three-volume Lectures on Physics remains in print.
Date in History: 11 May 1918
