Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman

Richard Phillips Feynman

(1918 - 1988) American theoretical physicist, best known for his contributions to

quantum electrodynamics

(QED). He won the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics.

He was born in New York of Jewish immigrants. Barely in high school, young Richard was way ahead of his classmates, mastering calculus while they struggled with algebra. After high school he went to MIT and was appointed a

Putnam Fellow

upon graduation. Feynman obtained a from Princeton and married Arlene Greenbaum there. After working on the Manhattan

Project

during World War II, Feynman taught physics at Cornell and later CalTech. His most wide-ranging contributions are perhaps the Feynman diagram and the

Feynman path integral

, initially used in quantum mechanics, but now used widely in many other areas of mathematics and physics.

During WWII he contributed
to the Manhattan project by leading a team who carried out numerical computations related to the A-bomb

development

.
Perhaps one of his more controversial contributions was in nuclear chromodynamics (QCD) where he postulated the

existence

of ‘partons’–hypothetical constituents of protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei– that were later defined more precisely (by identifying the

S

⁢

U

⁢

(

3

)

flavor

symmetry

of light ‘partons’) by the 1969 Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Man, who also re-named them ‘quarks’. Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann worked together on the vector

structure

of the weak interaction in physics, in

parallel

with the competing group of George Sudarshan and Robert Marshak; their work was soon to be fully developed after the

http://en.

wikipedia

.org/wiki/Murray_Gell-Mann

“seminal discovery of parity violation by Chien-Shiung Wu, as suggested by Chen-Ning Yang and T. D. Lee”.
In 1981, in several public addresses, Richard Feynman suggested the possibility of developing
quantum

machines

and

quantum computers

(

http://

planetmath

.org/QuantumAutomataAndQuantumComputation2

).

Most physicists were impressed with Feynman’s ability for applied mathematics. Feynman has Erdős number (

http://planetmath.org/ErdHosNumber

) 4. With Murray Gell-Mann he published an article on the theory of Fermi interaction for

Phys. Rev. (2)

in 1958. Gell-Mann in turn wrote an article on gauge theories with Sheldon Glashow for another physics journal, and Glashow co-authored an article on mass formulas and mass inequalities with Coleman and Daniel Kleitman. Kleitman co-authored with Erdős a paper “On

coloring

graphs to maximize the proportion of multicolored

k

-edges” in the

Journal of Combinatorial Theory

in 1968.

Famous for making jokes and pulling pranks, Feynman often claimed he wanted to memorize

π

to 767 decimal (now called the Feynman point in his honor). Feynman was honored on

: The Next Generation

with a shuttlecraft named after him. More recently, the

United States

Postal Service honored Feynman with 37-cent stamps along with fellow Manhattan Project alum

John von Neumann

.

Title

Richard Feynman

Canonical name

RichardFeynman

Date of creation

2013-03-22 17:14:37

Last modified on

2013-03-22 17:14:37

Owner

Mravinci (12996)

Last modified by

Mravinci (12996)

Numerical id

16

Author

Mravinci (12996)

Entry type

Biography

Classification

msc 81T18

Classification

msc 01A60

Synonym

Richard Phillips Feynman

Synonym

Richard P. Feynman

Related topic

FeynmanKacFormula

Related topic

QEDInTheoreticalAndMathematicalPhysics

Related topic

QuantumAutomataAndQuantumComputation2

Related topic

FeynmannPathIntegral

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