Mathematical physics refers to development of mathematical methods for application to problems in physics. The Journal of Mathematical Physics defines this area as: "the application of mathematics to problems in physics and the development of mathematical methods suitable for such applications and for the formulation of physical theories."^[1].

Scope of the subject[link]

There are several distinct branches of mathematical physics, and these roughly correspond to particular historical periods. The theory of partial differential equations (and the related areas of variational calculus, Fourier analysis, potential theory, and vector analysis) are perhaps most closely associated with mathematical physics. These were developed intensively from the second half of the eighteenth century (by, for example, D'Alembert, Euler, and Lagrange) until the 1930s. Physical applications of these developments include hydrodynamics, celestial mechanics, elasticity theory, acoustics, thermodynamics, electricity, magnetism, and aerodynamics.

The theory of atomic spectra (and, later, quantum mechanics) developed almost concurrently with the mathematical fields of linear algebra, the spectral theory of operators, and more broadly, functional analysis. These constitute the mathematical basis of another branch of mathematical physics.

The special and general theories of relativity require a rather different type of mathematics. This was group theory: and it played an important role in both quantum field theory and differential geometry. This was, however, gradually supplemented by topology in the mathematical description of cosmological as well as quantum field theory phenomena.

Statistical mechanics forms a separate field, which is closely related with the more mathematical ergodic theory and some parts of probability theory.

There are increasing interactions between combinatorics and physics, in particular statistical physics.

The usage of the term 'Mathematical physics' is sometimes idiosyncratic. Certain parts of mathematics that initially arose from the development of physics are not considered parts of mathematical physics, while other closely related fields are. For example, ordinary differential equations and symplectic geometry are generally viewed as purely mathematical disciplines, whereas dynamical systems and Hamiltonian mechanics belong to mathematical physics.

Mathematically rigorous physics[link]

The term 'mathematical' physics is also sometimes used in a special sense, to denote research aimed at studying and solving problems inspired by physics within a mathematically rigorous framework. Mathematical physics in this sense covers a very broad area of topics with the common feature that they blend pure mathematics and physics. Although related to theoretical physics, 'mathematical' physics in this sense emphasizes the mathematical rigour of the same type as found in mathematics. On the other hand, theoretical physics emphasizes the links to observations and experimental physics which often requires theoretical physicists (and mathematical physicists in the more general sense) to use heuristic, intuitive, and approximate arguments. Such arguments are not considered rigorous by mathematicians. Arguably, rigorous mathematical physics is closer to mathematics, and theoretical physics is closer to physics. This also has an institutional side: Many mathematical physicists are members of mathematics departments.

Such mathematical physicists primarily expand and elucidate physical theories. Because of the required rigor, these researchers often deal with questions that theoretical physicists have considered to already be solved. However, they can sometimes show (but neither commonly nor easily) that the previous solution was incorrect.^{[example needed]}

The field has concentrated in four main areas:

1. quantum field theory, especially the precise construction of models;
2. statistical mechanics, especially the theory of phase transitions; and
3. nonrelativistic quantum mechanics (Schrödinger operators), including the connections to atomic and molecular physics.
4. quantum information theory

The effort to put physical theories on a mathematically rigorous footing has inspired many mathematical developments. For example, the development of quantum mechanics and some aspects of functional analysis parallel each other in many ways. The mathematical study of quantum statistical mechanics has motivated results in operator algebras. The attempt to construct a rigorous quantum field theory has brought about progress in fields such as representation theory. Use of geometry and topology plays an important role in string theory.

Prominent mathematical physicists[link]

The seventeenth century English physicist and mathematician, Isaac Newton [1642–1727], developed a wealth of new mathematics (for example, calculus and several numerical methods [e.g. Newton's method ]) to solve problems in physics. Other important mathematical physicists of the seventeenth century included the Dutchman Christiaan Huygens [1629–1695] (famous for suggesting the wave theory of light), and the German Johannes Kepler [1571–1630] (Tycho Brahe's assistant, and discoverer of the equations for planetary motion/orbit).

In the eighteenth century, two of the innovators of mathematical physics were Swiss: Daniel Bernoulli [1700–1782] (for contributions to fluid dynamics, and vibrating strings), and, more especially, Leonhard Euler [1707–1783], (for his work in variational calculus, dynamics, fluid dynamics, and many other things). Another notable contributor was the Italian-born Frenchman, Joseph-Louis Lagrange [1736–1813] (for his work in mechanics and variational methods).

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, important French figures were Pierre-Simon Laplace [1749–1827] (in mathematical astronomy, potential theory, and mechanics) and Siméon Denis Poisson [1781–1840] (who also worked in mechanics and potential theory). In Germany, both Carl Friedrich Gauss [1777–1855] (in magnetism) and Carl Gustav Jacobi [1804–1851] (in the areas of dynamics and canonical transformations) made key contributions to the theoretical foundations of electricity, magnetism, mechanics, and fluid dynamics.

Gauss's contributions to non-Euclidean geometry laid the groundwork for the subsequent development of Riemannian geometry by Bernhard Riemann [1826–1866]. As we shall see later, this work is at the heart of general relativity.

The nineteenth century also saw the Scot, James Clerk Maxwell [1831–1879], win renown for his four equations of electromagnetism, and his countryman, Lord Kelvin [1824–1907] make substantial discoveries in thermodynamics. Among the English physics community, Lord Rayleigh [1842–1919] worked on sound; and George Gabriel Stokes [1819–1903] was a leader in optics and fluid dynamics; while the Irishman William Rowan Hamilton [1805–1865] was noted for his work in dynamics. The German Hermann von Helmholtz [1821–1894] is best remembered for his work in the areas of electromagnetism, waves, fluids, and sound. In the U.S.A., the pioneering work of Josiah Willard Gibbs [1839–1903] became the basis for statistical mechanics. Together, these men laid the foundations of electromagnetic theory, fluid dynamics and statistical mechanics.

The late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries saw the birth of special relativity. This had been anticipated in the works of the Dutchman, Hendrik Lorentz [1853–1928], with important insights from Jules-Henri Poincaré [1854–1912], but which were brought to full clarity by Albert Einstein [1879–1955]. Einstein then developed the invariant approach further to arrive at the remarkable geometrical approach to gravitational physics embodied in general relativity. This was based on the non-Euclidean geometry created by Gauss and Riemann in the previous century.

Einstein's special relativity replaced the Galilean transformations of space and time with Lorentz transformations in four dimensional Minkowski space-time. His general theory of relativity replaced the flat Euclidean geometry with that of a Riemannian manifold, whose curvature is determined by the distribution of gravitational matter. This replaced Newton's vector gravitational force by the Riemann curvature tensor.

Another revolutionary development of the twentieth century has been quantum theory, which emerged from the seminal contributions of Max Planck [1856–1947] (on black body radiation) and Einstein's work on the photoelectric effect. This was, at first, followed by a heuristic framework devised by Arnold Sommerfeld [1868–1951] and Niels Bohr [1885–1962], but this was soon replaced by the quantum mechanics developed by Max Born [1882–1970], Werner Heisenberg [1901–1976], Paul Dirac [1902–1984], Erwin Schrödinger [1887–1961], and Wolfgang Pauli [1900–1958]. This revolutionary theoretical framework is based on a probabilistic interpretation of states, and evolution and measurements in terms of self-adjoint operators on an infinite dimensional vector space (Hilbert space, introduced by David Hilbert [1862–1943]). Paul Dirac, for example, used algebraic constructions to produce a relativistic model for the electron, predicting its magnetic moment and the existence of its antiparticle, the positron.

Later important contributors to twentieth century mathematical physics include Satyendra Nath Bose [1894–1974], Julian Schwinger [1918–1994], Sin-Itiro Tomonaga [1906–1979], Richard Feynman [1918–1988], Freeman Dyson [1923– ], Hideki Yukawa [1907–1981], Roger Penrose [1931– ], Stephen Hawking [1942– ], Edward Witten [1951– ] and Rudolf Haag [1922– ]

See also[link]

• important publications in mathematical physics
• International Association of Mathematical Physics
• theoretical physics

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Zalsow, Eric (2005), Physmatics, arXiv:physics/0506153, Bibcode 2005physics...6153Z 

Further reading[link]

The Classics[link]

• Abraham, Ralph; Marsden, Jerrold E. (2008), 'Foundations of mechanics: a mathematical exposition of classical mechanics with an introduction to the qualitative theory of dynamical systems' (2nd ed.), Providence, [RI.]: AMS Chelsea Pub., ISBN 978-0-8218-4438-0 
• Arnold, Vladimir I.; Vogtmann, K.; Weinstein, A. (tr.) (1997), 'Mathematical methods of classical mechanics / [Matematicheskie metody klassicheskoĭ mekhaniki]' (2nd ed.), New York, [NY.]: Springer-Verlag, ISBN 0-387-96890-3 
• Courant, Richard; Hilbert, David (1989), Methods of mathematical physics, New York, [NY.]: Interscience Publishers 
• Glimm, James; Jaffe, Arthur (1987), 'Quantum physics: a functional integral point of view' (2nd ed.), New York, [NY.]: Springer-Verlag, ISBN 0-387-96477-0  (pbk.)
• Haag, Rudolf (1996), 'Local quantum physics: fields, particles, algebras' (2nd rev. & enl. ed.), Berlin, [Germany] ; New York, [NY.]: Springer-Verlag, ISBN 3-540-61049-9  (softcover)
• Hawking, Stephen W.; Ellis, George F. R. (1973), 'The large scale structure of space-time', Cambridge, [England]: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-20016-4 
• Kato, Tosio (1995), 'Perturbation theory for linear operators' (2nd repr. ed.), Berlin, [Germany]: Springer-Verlag, ISBN 3-540-58661-X  (This is a reprint of the second (1980) edition of this title.)
• Margenau, Henry; Murphy, George Moseley (1976), 'The mathematics of physics and chemistry' (2nd repr. ed.), Huntington, [NY.]: R. E. Krieger Pub. Co., ISBN 0-88275-423-8  (This is a reprint of the 1956 second edition.)
• Morse, Philip McCord; Feshbach, Herman (1999), 'Methods of theoretical physics' (repr. ed.), Boston, [Mass.]: McGraw Hill, ISBN 0-07-043316-X  (This is a reprint of the original (1953) edition of this title.)
• von Neumann, John; Beyer, Robert T. (tr.) (1955), 'Mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics', Princeton, [NJ.]: Princeton University Press 
• Reed, Michael C.; Simon, Barry (1972–1977), 'Methods of modern mathematical physics (4 vol.)', New York. {NY.]: Academic Press, ISBN 0-12-585001-8 
• Titchmarsh, Edward Charles (1939), 'The theory of functions' (2nd ed.), London, [England]: Oxford University Press  (This tome was reprinted in 1985.)
• Thirring, Walter E.; Harrell, Evans M. (tr.) (1978–1983), 'A course in mathematical physics / [Lehrbuch der mathematischen Physik] (4 vol.)', New York, [NY.]: Springer-Verlag 
• Weyl, Hermann; Robertson, H. P. (tr.) (1931), 'The theory of groups and quantum mechanics / [Gruppentheorie und Quantenmechanik]', London, [England]: Methuen & Co. 
• Whittaker, Edmund Taylor; Watson, George Neville (1927), 'A course of modern analysis: an introduction to the general theory of infinite processes and of analytic functions, with an account of the principal transcendental functions' (1st AMS ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-58807-2 

Textbooks for undergraduate studies[link]

• Arfken, George B.; Weber, Hans J. (1995), 'Mathematical methods for physicists' (4th ed.), San Diego, [CA.]: Academic Press, ISBN 0-12-059816-7  (pbk.)
• Boas, Mary L. (2006), 'Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences' (3rd ed.), Hoboken, [NJ.]: John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 978-0-471-19826-0 
• Butkov, Eugene (1968), 'Mathematical physics', Reading, [Mass.]: Addison-Wesley 
• Jeffreys, Harold; Swirles Jeffreys, Bertha (1956), 'Methods of mathematical physics' (3rd rev. ed.), Cambridge, [England]: Cambridge University Press 
• Kusse, Bruce R. (2006), 'Mathematical Physics: Applied Mathematics for Scientists and Engineers' (2nd ed.), [Germany]: Wiley-VCH, ISBN 3-527-40672-7 
• Joos, Georg; Freeman, Ira M. (1987), Theoretical Physics, Dover Publications, ISBN 0-486-65227-0 
• Mathews, Jon; Walker, Robert L. (1970), 'Mathematical methods of physics' (2nd ed.), New York, [NY.]: W. A. Benjamin, ISBN 0-8053-7002-1 
• Menzel, Donald Howard (1961), Mathematical Physics, Dover Publications, ISBN 0-486-60056-4 
• Stakgold, Ivar (c.2000), 'Boundary value problems of mathematical physics (2 vol.)', Philadelphia, [PA.]: Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, ISBN 0-89871-456-7  (set : pbk.)

Textbooks for graduate studies[link]

• Hassani, Sadri (1999), 'Mathematical Physics: A Modern Introduction to Its Foundations', Berlin, [Germany]: Springer-Verlag, ISBN 0-387-98579-4 
• Reed, M.; Simon, B. (1972-1977). Methods of Mathematical Physics. Vol 1-4. Academic Press. 
• Teschl, G. (2009). Mathematical Methods in Quantum Mechanics; With Applications to Schrödinger Operators. Providence: American Mathematical Society. ISBN 978-0-8218-4660-5. http://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~gerald/ftp/book-schroe/. 

Other specialised subareas[link]

• Aslam, Jamil; Hussain, Faheem (2007), 'Mathematical physics' Proceedings of the 12th Regional Conference, Islamabad, Pakistan, 27 March – 1 April 2006], Singapore: World Scientific, ISBN 978-981-270-591-4, http://www.worldscibooks.com/physics/6405.html 
• Baez, John C.; Muniain, Javier P. (1994), 'Gauge fields, knots, and gravity', Singapore ; River Edge, [NJ.]: World Scientific, ISBN 981-02-2034-0  (pbk.)
• Geroch, Robert (1985), 'Mathematical physics', Chicago, [IL.]: University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0-226-28862-5  (pbk.)
• Polyanin, Andrei D. (2002), 'Handbook of linear partial differential equations for engineers and scientists', Boca Raton, [FL.]: Chapman & Hall / CRC Press, ISBN 1-58488-299-9 
• Polyanin, Alexei D.; Zaitsev, Valentin F. (2004), 'Handbook of nonlinear partial differential equations', Boca Raton, [FL.]: Chapman & Hall / CRC Press, ISBN 1-58488-355-3 
• Szekeres, Peter (2004), 'A course in modern mathematical physics: groups, Hilbert space and differential geometry', Cambridge, [England]; New York, [NY.]: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-53645-6  (pbk.)
• Yndurain, Francisco J (2006), 'Theoretical and Mathematical Physics. The Theory of Quark and Gluon Interactions', Springer, ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978354033209I|978354033209I]]  (pbk.)

Carl M. Bender (born 1943) is Wilfred R. and Ann Lee Konneker Distinguished Professor of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis.^[1]

He received his A.B. in 1964 from Cornell University, where he graduated summa cum laude and with Distinction in All Subjects. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D in physics from Harvard University in 1965 and 1969, respectively.^[2]

Bender specializes in quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, black holes, global warming and theoretical physics. He also enjoys debunking scientific myths and the physics of the Star Wars series. He is an expert on lower dimensional quantum field theories, which he refers to as "country-style quantum physics".^[3]

Awards[link]

He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 for his work in lower dimensional quantum field theory.^[4]

In 1978 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is an Ulam Fellow, and he received the Fulbright Fellowship and Lady Davis Fellowship (visiting professor) in 1995.^[5][6]

Works[link]

• Carl M. Bender, Steven Orszag, Advanced Mathematical Methods for Scientists and Engineers: Asymptotic Methods and Perturbation Theory, Springer, 1999, ISBN 978-0-387-98931-0
• Carl M. Bender, Gerald V. Dunne, Covariance of the gauge field in three-dimensional quantum electrodynamics, Center for Theoretical Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1991

References[link]

External links[link]

• Webpage

This article about an American physicist is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Edward Witten
Born	(1951-08-26) August 26, 1951 (age 60) Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.
Residence	Princeton, New Jersey, U.S.
Nationality	American
Fields	Theoretical physics Superstring Theory
Institutions	Institute for Advanced Study Harvard University California Institute of Technology Princeton University
Alma mater	Brandeis University (B.A.) University of Wisconsin, Madison Princeton University (PhD)
Doctoral advisor	David Gross
Doctoral students	Jonathan Bagger Cumrun Vafa Steven Giddings Xiao-Gang Wen Eva Silverstein Shamit Kachru Sergei Gukov Mukund Rangamani Tamar Friedmann Peter Srvcek Christopher Beasley Dror Bar-Natan
Known for	String theory M-theory Quantum Gravity Quantum Field Theory Supersymmetry
Notable awards	MacArthur Fellowship (1982) Dirac Medal (1985) Albert Einstein Award (1985) Fields Medal (1990) Henri Poincaré Prize (2006) Alan T. Waterman Award (1995) Nemmers Prize (2000) Henniemen Award (2004) Harvey Prize (2005) Crafoord Prize (2008) Lorentz Medal (2010) Isaac Newton Medal (2010)
Spouse	Chiara Nappi
Website
http://www.sns.ias.edu/~witten/

Edward Witten (born August 26, 1951) is an American theoretical physicist with a focus on mathematical physics who is currently a professor of Mathematical Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Witten is a researcher in superstring theory, a theory of quantum gravity, supersymmetric quantum field theories and other areas of mathematical physics.^[1]

He has made contributions in mathematics and helped bridge gaps between fundamental physics and various areas of mathematics. In 1990 he was the world's first physicist to be awarded a Fields Medal by the International Union of Mathematics. In 2004, Time magazine stated that Witten was widely thought to be the world's greatest living theoretical physicist.^[2]

Birth and education[link]

Witten was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He is the son of Lorraine W. Witten and Louis Witten, a theoretical physicist specializing in gravitation and general relativity.

Witten attended the Park School of Baltimore (class of '68), and received his Bachelor of Arts with a major in history and minor in linguistics from Brandeis University in 1971. He published articles in The New Republic and The Nation. In 1968 Witten published an article in The Nation arguing that the New Left had no strategy. He worked briefly for George McGovern, a Democratic presidential nominee in 1972. McGovern lost the election in a landslide to Richard Nixon.

Witten attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison for one semester as an economics graduate student before dropping out. He returned to academia, enrolling in applied mathematics at Princeton University then shifting departments and receiving a Ph.D. in physics in 1976 under David Gross, the 2004 Nobel laureate in Physics. He held a fellowship at Harvard University (1976–77), was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows (1977–80), and held a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (1982).

Research[link]

Edward Witten with David Gross and Stephen Hawking.

Witten has made numerous contributions to theoretical physics, in work that has spawned a large number of highly mathematical results. As of August, 2011, he has more than 340 publications primarily in quantum field theory and string theory and in related areas of topology and geometry. In 2004, Time magazine wrote that Witten was "generally considered the greatest theoretical physicist in the world."^[2]

One of Witten's contributions in physics is a natural solution to the so-called hierarchy problem. The Standard Model of Particle Physics predicts a particle known as Higgs Boson. Its mass however seems much lighter than what the Model predicts. Witten has shown that the mechanism of broken supersymmetry offers a natural explanation to the hierarchy problem. In supersymmetry theory, the Witten Index tells whether supersymmetry is broken or not. Witten went on to make contributions in supersymmetric gauge theories. Along with Nathan Seiberg of the Institute of Advanced Studies Witten developed what is now known as Seiberg-Witten Theory which is related to Donaldson theory in mathematics.

As early as 1984, Witten worked on an important problem of gravitational anomaly which contributed to what is known as the first string theory revolution. With Gary Horowitz, Philip Candelas and Andy Strominger Witten showed how string theory can lead to realistic descriptions by compactifying the theory on a higher dimensional manifold known as Calabi Yau manifolds. In the string theory conference at University of Southern California in the mid-'90s, Witten solved an outstanding problem of how five different versions of string theory were just the same theory which are related to one another by dualities. Also, Witten conjectured the existence of a unifying theory called M-theory whose complete structures had not been discovered yet and non-technically could be described as what could be possibly the most fundamental physical theory of the universe. Stephen Hawking, in his book The Grand Design, wrote that M-theory may be the ultimate theory of the universe.

Edward Witten's other contribution to physics was to a relatively recent result of gauge gravity duality. In 1997, Juan Maldacena formulated a result establishing a relationship between gauge theories and a certain theory of gravity commonly known as AdS/CFT correspondence. This discovery has dominated theoretical physics for the past 15 years and Witten's work following Maldacena's insight has shed light on this relationship. His other contributions include a simplified proof of the positive energy theorem involving spinors in general relativity, his work relating supersymmetry and Morse theory, his introduction of topological quantum field theory and related work on mirror symmetry, knot theory, twistor theory and D-branes and their intersections.

Witten was awarded the Fields Medal^[3][4] by the International Mathematical Union in 1990, becoming the first physicist to win the prize. Sir Michael Atiyah said of Witten, "Although he is definitely a physicist, his command of mathematics is rivaled by few mathematicians... Time and again he has surprised the mathematical community by a brilliant application of physical insight leading to new and deep mathematical theorems... he has made a profound impact on contemporary mathematics. In his hands physics is once again providing a rich source of inspiration and insight in mathematics."^[5] One such example of his impact on pure mathematics is his framework for understanding the Jones polynomial using Chern–Simons theory. This had implications for low-dimensional topology and led to quantum invariants such as the Witten–Reshetikhin–Turaev invariants.

Personal life[link]

Witten is married to Chiara Nappi, a professor of physics at Princeton University. They have two daughters, Ilana and Daniela, and one son, Rafael, and a granddaughter Nava. Edward Witten serves on the board of directors of Americans for Peace Now.

Awards and honors[link]

Witten has been honored with numerous awards including a MacArthur Grant (1982), the Fields Medal (1990), the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics (2000), the National Medal of Science^[6] (2002), Pythagoras Award^[7] (2005), the Henri Poincaré Prize (2006), the Crafoord Prize (2008), the Lorentz Medal (2010) and the Isaac Newton Medal (2010). Pope Benedict XVI appointed Witten as a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (2006). He also appeared in the list of TIME magazine's 100 most influential people of 2004.

See also[link]

• Gromov–Witten invariant
• Hořava–Witten domain wall
• M theory
• Seiberg–Witten gauge theory
• Seiberg–Witten invariant
• Vafa–Witten theorem
• Weinberg–Witten theorem
• Wess–Zumino–Witten model
• Witten conjecture
• Witten index

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Edward Witten

• Faculty webpage
• Publications on ArXiv
• Witten theme tree on arxiv.org
• Futurama episode information
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Edward Witten", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Witten.html .
• Edward Witten at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Institute of Physics profile

Richard Feynman
File:Richard Feynman Nobel.jpg
Born	Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-05-11)May 11, 1918 Far Rockaway, Queens, New York, U.S.
Died	February 15, 1988(1988-02-15) (aged 69) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Residence	United States
Nationality	American
Fields	Physics
Institutions	Manhattan Project Cornell University California Institute of Technology
Alma mater	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (B.S.), Princeton University (Ph.D.)
Doctoral advisor	John Archibald Wheeler
Other academic advisors	Manuel Sandoval Vallarta
Doctoral students	F. L. Vernon, Jr.[1] Willard H. Wells[1] Al Hibbs[1] George Zweig[1] Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz[1] Thomas Curtright[1]
Other notable students	Douglas D. Osheroff Robert Barro W. Daniel Hillis
Known for	Feynman diagrams Feynman point Feynman–Kac formula Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory Bethe–Feynman formula Feynman sprinkler Feynman Long Division Puzzles Hellmann–Feynman theorem Feynman slash notation Feynman parametrization Sticky bead argument One-electron universe Quantum cellular automata
Influences	Paul Dirac
Notable awards	Albert Einstein Award (1954) E. O. Lawrence Award (1962) Nobel Prize in Physics (1965) Oersted Medal (1972) National Medal of Science (1979)
Spouse	Arline Greenbaum (m. 1941–1945) «start: (1941)–end+1: (1946)»"Marriage: Arline Greenbaum to Richard Feynman" Location: (linkback:http://en-wiki.pop.wn.com/index.php/Richard_Feynman)(died) Mary Lou Bell (m. 1952–1954) «start: (1952)–end+1: (1955)»"Marriage: Mary Lou Bell to Richard Feynman" Location: (linkback:http://en-wiki.pop.wn.com/index.php/Richard_Feynman) Gweneth Howarth (m. 1960–1988) «start: (1960)–end+1: (1989)»"Marriage: Gweneth Howarth to Richard Feynman" Location: (linkback:http://en-wiki.pop.wn.com/index.php/Richard_Feynman) (his death)
Signature
Notes He was the father of Carl Feynman and adoptive father of Michelle Feynman. He was the brother of Joan Feynman.

Richard Phillips Feynman ( /ˈfaɪnmən/; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988)^[2] was an American physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics (he proposed the parton model). For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. He developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions governing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal Physics World he was ranked as one of the ten greatest physicists of all time.^[3]

He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb and was a member of the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. In addition to his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing,^[4][5] and introducing the concept of nanotechnology.^[6] He held the Richard Chace Tolman professorship in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology.

Feynman was a keen popularizer of physics through both books and lectures, notably 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. Feynman also became known through his semi-autobiographical books (Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?) and books written about him, such as Tuva or Bust!.

He also had a deep interest in biology, and was a friend of the geneticist and microbiologist Esther Lederberg, who developed replica plating and discovered bacteriophage lambda.^[7] They had several mutual physicist friends who, after beginning their careers in nuclear research, moved into genetics, among them Max Delbrück and Aaron Novick.

Biography[link]

Early life[link]

Richard Phillips Feynman was born on May 11, 1918,^[8] in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York.^[9] His family originated from Russia and Poland; both of his parents were Ashkenazi Jewish.^[10] They were not religious and by his youth Feynman described himself as an “avowed atheist”.^[11] Feynman (in common with the famous physicist Edward Teller) was a late talker; by his third birthday he had yet to utter a single word. The young Feynman was heavily influenced by his father, Melville, who encouraged him to ask questions to challenge orthodox thinking. From his mother, Lucille, he gained the sense of humor that he had throughout his life. As a child, he had a talent for engineering, maintained an experimental laboratory in his home, and delighted in repairing radios. His younger sister Joan also became a professional physicist.^[12][13]

Education[link]

In high school, his IQ was determined to be 125—high, but “merely respectable” according to biographer James Gleick.^[14] Feynman later scoffed at psychometric testing. In the year 1933, in which he turned 15, he taught himself trigonometry, advanced algebra, infinite series, analytic geometry, and differential and integral calculus.^[15] Before entering college, he was experimenting with and re-creating mathematical topics, such as the half-derivative, using his own notation. In high school, he was developing the mathematical intuition behind his Taylor series of mathematical operators.^[16]

His habit of direct characterization sometimes rattled more conventional thinkers; for example, one of his questions, when learning feline anatomy, was “Do you have a map of the cat?” (referring to an anatomical chart).

Feynman attended Far Rockaway High School, a school also attended by fellow laureates Burton Richter and Baruch Samuel Blumberg.^[17] A member of the Arista Honor Society, in his last year in high school, Feynman won the New York University Math Championship; the large difference between his score and those of his closest competitors shocked the judges.^[18]

He applied to Columbia University, but was not accepted.^[19][20] Instead he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1939, and in the same year was named a Putnam Fellow. While there, Feynman took every physics course offered, including a graduate course on theoretical physics while only in his second year.

He obtained a perfect score on the graduate school entrance exams to Princeton University in mathematics and physics—an unprecedented feat—but did rather poorly on the history and English portions.^[18] Attendees at Feynman’s first seminar included Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, and John von Neumann. He received a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1942; his thesis advisor was John Archibald Wheeler. Feynman’s thesis applied the principle of stationary action to problems of quantum mechanics, inspired by a desire to quantize the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory of electrodynamics, laying the groundwork for the “path integral” approach and Feynman diagrams, and was titled “The Principle of Least Action in Quantum Mechanics”.

This was Richard Feynman nearing the crest of his powers. At twenty-three … there was no physicist on earth who could match his exuberant command over the native materials of theoretical science. It was not just a facility at mathematics (though it had become clear … that the mathematical machinery emerging from the Wheeler–Feynman collaboration was beyond Wheeler’s own ability). Feynman seemed to possess a frightening ease with the substance behind the equations, like Albert Einstein at the same age, like the Soviet physicist Lev Landau—but few others.

— James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

The Manhattan Project[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

Feynman (center) with Robert Oppenheimer (right) relaxing at a Los Alamos social function during the Manhattan Project

At Princeton, the physicist Robert R. Wilson encouraged Feynman to participate in the Manhattan Project—the wartime U.S. Army project at Los Alamos developing the atomic bomb. Feynman said he was persuaded to join this effort to build it before Nazi Germany developed their own bomb.

He was assigned to Hans Bethe’s theoretical division, and impressed Bethe enough to be made a group leader. He and Bethe developed the Bethe–Feynman formula for calculating the yield of a fission bomb, which built upon previous work by Robert Serber.

He immersed himself in work on the project, and was present at the Trinity bomb test. Feynman claimed to be the only person to see the explosion without the very dark glasses or welder’s lenses provided, reasoning that it was safe to look through a truck windshield, as it would screen out the harmful ultraviolet radiation.

As a junior physicist, he was not central to the project. The greater part of his work was administering the computation group of human computers in the Theoretical division (one of his students there, John G. Kemeny, later went on to co-design and co-specify the programming language BASIC). Later, with Nicholas Metropolis, he assisted in establishing the system for using IBM punched cards for computation. Feynman succeeded in solving one of the equations for the project that were posted on the blackboards. However, they did not “do the physics right” and Feynman’s solution was not used.

Feynman’s other work at Los Alamos included calculating neutron equations for the Los Alamos “Water Boiler”, a small nuclear reactor, to measure how close an assembly of fissile material was to criticality. On completing this work he was transferred to the Oak Ridge facility, where he aided engineers in devising safety procedures for material storage so that criticality accidents (for example, due to sub-critical amounts of fissile material inadvertently stored in proximity on opposite sides of a wall) could be avoided. He also did theoretical work and calculations on the proposed uranium hydride bomb, which later proved not to be feasible.

Feynman was sought out by physicist Niels Bohr for one-on-one discussions. He later discovered the reason: most physicists were too in awe of Bohr to argue with him. Feynman had no such inhibitions, vigorously pointing out anything he considered to be flawed in Bohr’s thinking. Feynman said he felt as much respect for Bohr as anyone else, but once anyone got him talking about physics, he would become so focused he forgot about social niceties.

Due to the top secret nature of the work, Los Alamos was isolated. In Feynman’s own words, “There wasn’t anything to do there”. Bored, he indulged his curiosity by learning to pick the combination locks on cabinets and desks used to secure papers. Feynman played many jokes on colleagues. In one case he found the combination to a locked filing cabinet by trying the numbers a physicist would use (it proved to be 27–18–28 after the base of natural logarithms, e = 2.71828…), and found that the three filing cabinets where a colleague kept a set of atomic bomb research notes all had the same combination. He left a series of notes as a prank, which initially spooked his colleague, Frederic de Hoffmann, into thinking a spy or saboteur had gained access to atomic bomb secrets. On several occasions, Feynman drove to Albuquerque to see his ailing wife in a car borrowed from Klaus Fuchs, who was later discovered to be a real spy for the Soviets, transporting nuclear secrets in his car to Santa Fe.

On occasion, Feynman would find an isolated section of the mesa to drum in the style of American natives; “and maybe I would dance and chant, a little”. These antics did not go unnoticed, and rumors spread about a mysterious Indian drummer called “Injun Joe”. He also became a friend of laboratory head J. Robert Oppenheimer, who unsuccessfully tried to court him away from his other commitments after the war to work at the University of California, Berkeley.

Feynman alludes to his thoughts on the justification for getting involved in the Manhattan project in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. As mentioned earlier, he felt the possibility of Nazi Germany developing the bomb before the Allies was a compelling reason to help with its development for the US. However, he goes on to say that it was an error on his part not to reconsider the situation when Germany was defeated. In the same publication, Feynman also talks about his worries in the atomic bomb age, feeling for some considerable time that there was a high risk that the bomb would be used again soon so that it was pointless to build for the future. Later he describes this period as a “depression.”

Early academic career[link]

Following the completion of his Ph.D. in 1942, Feynman held an appointment at the University of Wisconsin–Madison as an assistant professor of physics. The appointment was spent on leave for his involvement in the Manhattan project. In 1945, he received a letter from Dean Mark Ingraham of the College of Letters and Science requesting his return to UW to teach in the coming academic year. His appointment was not extended when he did not commit to return. In a talk given several years later at UW, Feynman quipped, “It’s great to be back at the only university that ever had the good sense to fire me”.^[21]

After the war, Feynman declined an offer from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, despite the presence there of such distinguished faculty members as Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, and John von Neumann. Feynman followed Hans Bethe, instead, to Cornell University, where Feynman taught theoretical physics from 1945 to 1950.^[16] During a temporary depression following the destruction of Hiroshima by the bomb produced by the Manhattan Project, he focused on complex physics problems, not for utility, but for self-satisfaction. One of these was analyzing the physics of a twirling, nutating dish as it is moving through the air. His work during this period, which used equations of rotation to express various spinning speeds, soon proved important to his Nobel Prize-winning work. Yet because he felt burned out, and had turned his attention to less immediately practical but more entertaining problems, he felt surprised by the offers of professorships from other renowned universities.^[16]

Despite yet another offer from the Institute for Advanced Study, Feynman rejected the Institute on the grounds that there were no teaching duties: Feynman felt that students were a source of inspiration and teaching a diversion during uncreative spells. Because of this, the Institute for Advanced study and Princeton University jointly offered him a package whereby he could teach at the university and also be at the Institute. That he also turned this down suggests the effects of his depression^{[not in citation given]}. (see Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!). Somewhat later, feeling better, Feynman accepted an offer from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) — and as he says in his book Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman! — because a desire to live in a mild climate had firmly fixed itself in his mind while installing tire chains on his car in the middle of a snowstorm in Ithaca.

Feynman has been called the “Great Explainer”.^[22] He gained a reputation for taking great care when giving explanations to his students and for making it a moral duty to make the topic accessible. His guiding principle was that if a topic could not be explained in a freshman lecture, it was not yet fully understood. Feynman gained great pleasure^[23] from coming up with such a “freshman-level” explanation, for example, of the connection between spin and statistics. What he said was that groups of particles with spin ½ “repel”, whereas groups with integer spin “clump.” This was a brilliantly simplified way of demonstrating how Fermi–Dirac statistics and Bose–Einstein statistics evolved as a consequence of studying how fermions and bosons behave under a rotation of 360°. This was also a question he pondered in his more advanced lectures and to which he demonstrated the solution in the 1986 Dirac memorial lecture.^[24] In the same lecture, he further explained that antiparticles must exist, for if particles only had positive energies, they would not be restricted to a so-called “light cone.”

He opposed rote learning or unthinking memorization and other teaching methods that emphasized form over function. He put these opinions into action whenever he could, from a conference on education in Brazil to a State Commission on school textbook selection. Clear thinking and clear presentation were fundamental prerequisites for his attention. It could be perilous even to approach him when unprepared, and he did not forget the fools or pretenders.^[25]

During one sabbatical year, he returned to Newton’s Principia Mathematica to study it anew; what he learned from Newton, he passed along to his students, such as Newton’s attempted explanation of diffraction.^{[citation needed]}

Caltech years[link]

The Feynman section at the Caltech bookstore

Feynman did significant work while at Caltech, including research in:

• Quantum electrodynamics. The theory for which Feynman won his Nobel Prize is known for its accurate predictions.^[26][27] This theory was begun in the earlier years during Feynman’s work at Princeton as a graduate student and continued while he was at Cornell. This work consisted of two distinct formulations, and it is a common error to confuse them or to merge them into one. The first is his path integral formulation, and the second is his Feynman diagrams. Both formulations contained his sum over histories method in which every possible path from one state to the next is considered, the final path being a sum over the possibilities (also referred to as sum-over-paths.)^[28] For a number of years he lectured to students at Caltech on his path integral formulation of quantum theory. The lecture notes have recently been reedited by Daniel F. Styer and published as a Dover paperback. Not only did Styer correct several hundred typographical and other minor errors, but he included many footnotes explaining, for example, several places where the author used heuristic or plausible reasoning. The second formulation of quantum electrodynamics (using Feynman diagrams) was specifically mentioned by the Nobel committee. The logical connection with the path integral formulation is interesting. Feynman did not prove that the rules for his diagrams followed mathematically from the path integral formulation. Some special cases were later proved by other people, but only in the real case, so the proofs don’t work when spin is involved. The second formulation should be thought of as starting anew, but guided by the intuitive insight provided by the first formulation. Freeman Dyson published a paper in 1949 which, among many other things, added new rules to Feynman’s which told how to actually implement Renormalization. Students everywhere learned and used the powerful new tool that Feynman had created. Eventually computer programs were written to compute Feynman diagrams, providing a tool of unprecedented power. It is possible to write such programs because the Feynman diagrams constitute a Formal language with a grammar.

• Physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, where helium seems to display a complete lack of viscosity when flowing. Applying the Schrödinger equation to the question showed that the superfluid was displaying quantum mechanical behavior observable on a macroscopic scale. This helped with the problem of superconductivity; however, the solution eluded Feynman.^[29] It was solved with the BCS theory of superconductivity, proposed by John Bardeen, Leon Neil Cooper, and John Robert Schrieffer.

• A model of weak decay, which showed that the current coupling in the process is a combination of vector and axial currents (an example of weak decay is the decay of a neutron into an electron, a proton, and an anti-neutrino). Although E. C. George Sudarshan and Robert Marshak developed the theory nearly simultaneously, Feynman’s collaboration with Murray Gell-Mann was seen as seminal because the weak interaction was neatly described by the vector and axial currents. It thus combined the 1933 beta decay theory of Enrico Fermi with an explanation of parity violation.

Richard Feynman at Fermilab

He also developed Feynman diagrams, a bookkeeping device which helps in conceptualizing and calculating interactions between particles in spacetime, notably the interactions between electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons. This device allowed him, and later others, to approach time reversibility and other fundamental processes. Feynman’s mental picture for these diagrams started with the hard sphere approximation, and the interactions could be thought of as collisions at first. It was not until decades later that physicists thought of analyzing the nodes of the Feynman diagrams more closely. Feynman famously painted Feynman diagrams on the exterior of his van.^[30]

From his diagrams of a small number of particles interacting in spacetime, Feynman could then model all of physics in terms of those particles’ spins and the range of coupling of the fundamental forces.^[31] Feynman attempted an explanation of the strong interactions governing nucleons scattering called the parton model. The parton model emerged as a complement to the quark model developed by his Caltech colleague Murray Gell-Mann. The relationship between the two models was murky; Gell-Mann referred to Feynman’s partons derisively as “put-ons”. In the mid 1960s, physicists believed that quarks were just a bookkeeping device for symmetry numbers, not real particles, as the statistics of the Omega-minus particle, if it were interpreted as three identical strange quarks bound together, seemed impossible if quarks were real. The Stanford linear accelerator deep inelastic scattering experiments of the late 1960s showed, analogously to Ernest Rutherford’s experiment of scattering alpha particles on gold nuclei in 1911, that nucleons (protons and neutrons) contained point-like particles which scattered electrons. It was natural to identify these with quarks, but Feynman’s parton model attempted to interpret the experimental data in a way which did not introduce additional hypotheses. For example, the data showed that some 45% of the energy momentum was carried by electrically neutral particles in the nucleon. These electrically neutral particles are now seen to be the gluons which carry the forces between the quarks and carry also the three-valued color quantum number which solves the Omega-minus problem. Feynman did not dispute the quark model; for example, when the fifth quark was discovered in 1977, Feynman immediately pointed out to his students that the discovery implied the existence of a sixth quark, which was duly discovered in the decade after his death.

After the success of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman turned to quantum gravity. By analogy with the photon, which has spin 1, he investigated the consequences of a free massless spin 2 field, and was able to derive the Einstein field equation of general relativity, but little more.^[32] However, the computational device that Feynman discovered then for gravity, “ghosts”, which are “particles” in the interior of his diagrams which have the “wrong” connection between spin and statistics, have proved invaluable in explaining the quantum particle behavior of the Yang–Mills theories, for example QCD and the electro-weak theory.

In 1965, Feynman was appointed a foreign member of the Royal Society.^[33] At this time in the early 1960s, Feynman exhausted himself by working on multiple major projects at the same time, including a request, while at Caltech, to “spruce up” the teaching of undergraduates. After three years devoted to the task, he produced a series of lectures that eventually became the Feynman Lectures on Physics, one reason that Feynman is still regarded as one of the greatest teachers of physics. He wanted a picture of a drumhead sprinkled with powder to show the modes of vibration at the beginning of the book. Outraged by many rock and roll and drug connections that could be made from the image, the publishers changed the cover to plain red, though they included a picture of him playing drums in the foreword. Feynman later won the Oersted Medal for teaching, of which he seemed especially proud.^[34]

His students competed keenly for his attention; he was once awakened when a student solved a problem and dropped it in his mailbox; glimpsing the student sneaking across his lawn, he could not go back to sleep, and he read the student’s solution. The next morning his breakfast was interrupted by another triumphant student, but Feynman informed him that he was too late.

Partly as a way to bring publicity to progress in physics, Feynman offered $1000 prizes for two of his challenges in nanotechnology, claimed by William McLellan and Tom Newman, respectively.^[35] He was also one of the first scientists to conceive the possibility of quantum computers.

Many of his lectures and other miscellaneous talks were turned into books, including The Character of Physical Law and QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. He gave lectures which his students annotated into books, such as Statistical Mechanics and Lectures on Gravity. The Feynman Lectures on Physics^[36] occupied two physicists, Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands as part-time co-authors for several years. Even though they were not adopted by most universities as textbooks, the books continue to be bestsellers because they provide a deep understanding of physics. As of 2005, The Feynman Lectures on Physics has sold over 1.5 million copies in English, an estimated 1 million copies in Russian, and an estimated half million copies in other languages.^{[citation needed]}

In 1974, Feynman delivered the Caltech commencement address on the topic of cargo cult science, which has the semblance of science but is only pseudoscience due to a lack of “a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty” on the part of the scientist. He instructed the graduating class that “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.”^[37]

In 1984–86, he developed a variational method for the approximate calculation of path integrals which has led to a powerful method of converting divergent perturbation expansions into convergent strong-coupling expansions (variational perturbation theory) and, as a consequence, to the most accurate determination^[38] of critical exponents measured in satellite experiments.^[39]

In the late 1980s, according to “Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine”, Feynman played a crucial role in developing the first massively parallel computer, and in finding innovative uses for it in numerical computations, in building neural networks, as well as physical simulations using cellular automata (such as turbulent fluid flow), working with Stephen Wolfram at Caltech.^[40] His son Carl also played a role in the development of the original Connection Machine engineering; Feynman influencing the interconnects while his son worked on the software.

Feynman diagrams are now fundamental for string theory and M-theory, and have even been extended topologically.^{[citation needed]} The world-lines of the diagrams have developed to become tubes to allow better modeling of more complicated objects such as strings and membranes. However, shortly before his death, Feynman criticized string theory in an interview: “I don’t like that they’re not calculating anything,” he said. “I don’t like that they don’t check their ideas. I don’t like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation—a fix-up to say, ‘Well, it still might be true.’” These words have since been much-quoted by opponents of the string-theoretic direction for particle physics.^[41]

Challenger disaster[link]

The 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster

Feynman played an important role on the Presidential Rogers Commission, which investigated the Challenger disaster. During a televised hearing, Feynman demonstrated that the material used in the shuttle's O-rings became less resilient in cold weather by immersing a sample of the material in ice-cold water. The Commission ultimately determined that the disaster was caused by the primary O-ring not properly sealing due to extremely cold weather at Cape Canaveral.^[42]

Feynman devoted the latter half of his book What Do You Care What Other People Think? to his experience on the Rogers Commission, straying from his usual convention of brief, light-hearted anecdotes to deliver an extended and sober narrative. Feynman’s account reveals a disconnect between NASA’s engineers and executives that was far more striking than he expected. His interviews of NASA’s high-ranking managers revealed startling misunderstandings of elementary concepts. For instance, NASA managers claimed that there was a 1 in 100,000 chance of a catastrophic failure aboard the shuttle, but Feynman discovered that NASA's own engineers estimated the chance of a catastrophe at closer to 1 in 100. He concluded that the NASA management’s space shuttle reliability estimate was fantastically unrealistic, and was particularly angered that NASA used these figures to recruit Christa McAuliffe into the Teacher-in-Space program. He warned in his appendix to the commission’s report (which was included after he threatened not to sign the report), “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”^[43] He also rebuked some mathematicians for their exclusivity, saying “I have great suspicion that [mathematicians] don’t know that this stuff is wrong and that they’re intimidating people.”^[44]

Ethnic identification[link]

Though raised Jewish and born to Ashkenazi parents, Feynman himself was not only atheist, but distanced himself from being labelled Jewish even on ethnic grounds. He routinely refused to be included in lists or books that classified people by race. He asked to not be included in Tina Levitan’s, The Laureates: Jewish Winners of the Nobel Prize, writing, "To select, for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory," and adding "…at thirteen I was not only converted to other religious views but I also stopped believing that the Jewish people are in any way 'the chosen people'".^[45][46]

Personal life[link]

While researching for his Ph.D., Feynman married his first wife, Arline Greenbaum (often spelled Arlene). She was diagnosed with tuberculosis, but she and Feynman were careful, and he never contracted it. She succumbed to the disease in 1945. In 1946 Feynman wrote a letter to her but kept it sealed until after his death.^[47] This portion of Feynman’s life was portrayed in the 1996 film Infinity, which featured Feynman’s daughter Michelle in a cameo role.

He was married a second time in June 1952, to Mary Louise Bell of Neodesha, Kansas; this marriage was brief and unsuccessful:

He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving in his car, while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night.

—Mary Louise Bell divorce complaint^[48]p.168

He later married Gweneth Howarth from Ripponden, Yorkshire, who shared his enthusiasm for life and spirited adventure.^[49] Besides their home in Altadena, California, they had a beach house in Baja California, purchased with the prize money from Feynman’s Nobel Prize, his one third share of $55,000. They remained married until Feynman’s death. They had a son, Carl, in 1962, and adopted a daughter, Michelle, in 1968.^[49]

Feynman had a great deal of success teaching Carl, using discussions about ants and Martians as a device for gaining perspective on problems and issues; he was surprised to learn that the same teaching devices were not useful with Michelle.^[50] Mathematics was a common interest for father and son; they both entered the computer field as consultants and were involved in advancing a new method of using multiple computers to solve complex problems—later known as parallel computing. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory retained Feynman as a computational consultant during critical missions. One co-worker characterized Feynman as akin to Don Quixote at his desk, rather than at a computer workstation, ready to do battle with the windmills.

Feynman traveled widely, notably to Brazil, where he gave courses at the CBPF (Brazilian Center for Physics Research) and near the end of his life schemed to visit the Russian land of Tuva, a dream that, because of Cold War bureaucratic problems, never became reality.^[51] The day after he died, a letter arrived for him from the Soviet government giving him authorization to travel to Tuva. Out of his enthusiastic interest in reaching Tuva came the phrase “Tuva or Bust” (also the title of a book about his efforts to get there), which was tossed about frequently amongst his circle of friends in hope that they, one day, could see it firsthand. The documentary movie Genghis Blues mentions some of his attempts to communicate with Tuva, and chronicles the successful journey there by his friends.

Responding to Hubert Humphrey’s congratulation for his Nobel Prize, Feynman admitted to a long admiration for the then vice president.^[52] In a letter to an MIT professor dated December 6, 1966, Feynman expressed interest in running for the governor of California.^[53]

Feynman took up drawing at one time and enjoyed some success under the pseudonym “Ofey”, culminating in an exhibition dedicated to his work. He learned to play a metal percussion instrument (frigideira) in a samba style in Brazil, and participated in a samba school.

In addition, he had some degree of synesthesia for equations, explaining that the letters in certain mathematical functions appeared in color for him, even though invariably printed in standard black-and-white.^[54]

According to Genius, the James Gleick–authored biography, Feynman tried LSD during his professorship at Caltech.^[18] Somewhat embarrassed by his actions, Feynman largely sidestepped the issue when dictating his anecdotes; he mentions it in passing in the “O Americano, Outra Vez” section, while the “Altered States” chapter in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! describes only marijuana and ketamine experiences at John Lilly’s famed sensory deprivation tanks, as a way of studying consciousness.^[16] Feynman gave up alcohol when he began to show early signs of alcoholism, as he did not want to do anything that could damage his brain—the same reason given in “O Americano, Outra Vez” for his reluctance to experiment with LSD.^[16]

In Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, he gives advice on the best way to pick up a girl in a hostess bar. At Caltech, he used a nude/topless bar as an office away from his usual office, making sketches or writing physics equations on paper placemats. When the county officials tried to close the place, all visitors except Feynman refused to testify in favor of the bar, fearing that their families or patrons would learn about their visits. Only Feynman accepted, and in court, he affirmed that the bar was a public need, stating that craftsmen, technicians, engineers, common workers “and a physics professor” frequented the establishment. While the bar lost the court case, it was allowed to remain open as a similar case was pending appeal.^[16]

Feynman has a minor acting role in the film Anti-Clock. He is credited as “The Professor.”^[55]

Death[link]

Feynman developed two rare forms of cancer, Liposarcoma and Waldenström's macroglobulinemia, dying shortly after a final attempt at surgery for the former on February 15, 1988, aged 69.^[18] His last recorded words are noted as “I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.”^[18][56]

Popular legacy[link]

Alan Alda, the stage, screen and television actor, studied writings about Richard Feynman’s life during the 1990s in preparation for playing the role of Feynman on stage in a yet-to-be developed play. Playwright Peter Parnell was commissioned by Alda to write a two-character play about a fictional day in the life of Feynman set two years prior to Feynman’s death from cancer, based upon Alda’s biographical research. The play, entitled QED, premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, CA in 2001. The play was then presented at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre on Broadway; with both presentations starring Alan Alda as the scientist, Richard Feynman.

On May 4, 2005, the United States Postal Service issued the American Scientists commemorative set of four 37-cent self-adhesive stamps in several configurations. The scientists depicted were Richard Feynman, John von Neumann, Barbara McClintock and Josiah Willard Gibbs. Feynman’s stamp, sepia-toned, features a photograph of a 30-something Feynman and eight small Feynman diagrams.^[57] The stamps were designed by artist Victor Stabin under the direction of U.S. Postal Service art director Carl T. Herrman.^[58]

The main building for the Computing Division at Fermilab is named the “Feynman Computing Center” in his honor.^[59]

The principal character in Thomas A. McMahon’s 1970 novel, Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry: A Novel, is modeled on Feynman.^{[citation needed]}

Real Time Opera premiered its opera Feynman at the Norfolk (CT) Chamber Music Festival in June 2005.^[60]

On the 20th anniversary of Feynman’s death, composer Edward Manukyan dedicated a piece for solo clarinet to his memory.^[61] It was premiered by Doug Storey, the principal clarinetist of the Amarillo Symphony.

In 2009–11, clips of an interview with Feynman were used by composer John Boswell as part of the Symphony of Science project in the second, fifth, seventh, and eleventh installments of his videos, “We Are All Connected”, “The Poetry of Reality”, “A Wave of Reason”, and “The Quantum World”.^[62]

In 1998, a photo of Richard Feynman giving a lecture was part of the poster series commissioned by Apple Computer for their “Think Different” advertising campaign.^[63]

In 2011 Feynman was the subject of a biographical graphic novel titled simply Feynman, written by Jim Ottaviani and illustrated by Leland Myrick.^[64]

Bibliography[link]

Selected scientific works[link]

• Feynman, Richard P. (2000). Laurie M. Brown. ed. Selected Papers of Richard Feynman: With Commentary. 20th Century Physics. World Scientific. ISBN 978-981-02-4131-5. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (1942). Laurie M. Brown. ed. The Principle of Least Action in Quantum Mechanics. Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University. World Scientific (with title Feynman’s Thesis: a New Approach to Quantum Theory). 2005. ISBN 978-981-256-380-4. 
• Wheeler, John A.; Feynman, Richard P. (1945). "Interaction with the Absorber as the Mechanism of Radiation". Rev. Mod. Phys. 17 (2–3): 157–181. Bibcode 1945RvMP...17..157W. DOI:10.1103/RevModPhys.17.157. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (1946). A Theorem and its Application to Finite Tampers. Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Atomic Energy Commission. OSTI 4341197. 
• Feynman, Richard P.; Welton, T. A. (1946). Neutron Diffusion in a Space Lattice of Fissionable and Absorbing Materials. Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Atomic Energy Commission. OSTI 4381097. 
• Feynman, Richard P.; Metropolis, N.; Teller, E. (1947). Equations of State of Elements Based on the Generalized Fermi-Thomas Theory. Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Atomic Energy Commission. OSTI 4417654. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (1948a). "Space-time approach to non-relativistic quantum mechanics". Rev. Mod. Phys. 20 (2): 367–387. Bibcode 1948RvMP...20..367F. DOI:10.1103/RevModPhys.20.367. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (1948b). "Relativistic Cut-Off for Quantum Electrodynamics". Physical Review 74 (10): 1430–1438. Bibcode 1948PhRv...74.1430F. DOI:10.1103/PhysRev.74.1430. 
• Wheeler, John A.; Feynman, Richard P. (1949). "Classical Electrodynamics in Terms of Direct Interparticle Action". Rev. Mod. Phys. 21 (3): 425–433. Bibcode 1949RvMP...21..425W. DOI:10.1103/RevModPhys.21.425. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (1949). "The theory of positrons". Phys. Rev. 76 (6): 749–759. Bibcode 1949PhRv...76..749F. DOI:10.1103/PhysRev.76.749. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (1949b). "Space-Time Approach to Quantum Electrodynamic". Phys. Rev. 76 (6): 769–789. Bibcode 1949PhRv...76..769F. DOI:10.1103/PhysRev.76.769. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (1950). "Mathematical formulation of the quantum theory of electromagnetic interaction". Phys. Rev. 80 (3): 440–457. Bibcode 1950PhRv...80..440F. DOI:10.1103/PhysRev.80.440. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (1951). "An Operator Calculus Having Applications in Quantum Electrodynamics". Phys. Rev. 84: 108–128. Bibcode 1951PhRv...84..108F. DOI:10.1103/PhysRev.84.108. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (1953). "The λ-Transition in Liquid Helium". Phys. Rev. 90 (6): 1116–1117. Bibcode 1953PhRv...90.1116F. DOI:10.1103/PhysRev.90.1116.2. 
• Feynman, Richard P.; de Hoffmann, F.; Serber, R. (1955). Dispersion of the Neutron Emission in U235 Fission. Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Atomic Energy Commission. OSTI 4354998. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (1956). "Science and the Open Channel". Science 123 (3191): 307. February 24, 1956. Bibcode 1956Sci...123..307F. DOI:10.1126/science.123.3191.307. PMID 17774518. 
• Cohen, M.; Feynman, Richard P. (1957). "Theory of Inelastic Scattering of Cold Neutrons from Liquid Helium". Phys. Rev. 107: 13–24. Bibcode 1957PhRv..107...13C. DOI:10.1103/PhysRev.107.13. 
• Feynman, Richard P.; Vernon, F. L.; Hellwarth, R.W. (1957). "Geometric representation of the Schrödinger equation for solving maser equations". J. Appl. Phys 28: 49. Bibcode 1957JAP....28...49F. DOI:10.1063/1.1722572. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (1959). "Plenty of Room at the Bottom". Presentation to American Physical Society. http://www.its.caltech.edu/~feynman/plenty.html. 
• Edgar, R. S.; Feynman, Richard P.; Klein, S.; Lielausis, I.; Steinberg, CM (1962). "Mapping experiments with r mutants of bacteriophage T4D". Genetics 47: 179–86. February 1962. PMC 1210321. PMID 13889186. //www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=1210321. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (1966). "The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics". Science 153 (3737): 699–708. August 12, 1966. Bibcode 1966Sci...153..699F. DOI:10.1126/science.153.3737.699. PMID 17791121. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (1974a). "Structure of the proton". Science 183 (4125): 601–610. February 15, 1974. Bibcode 1974Sci...183..601F. DOI:10.1126/science.183.4125.601. PMID 17778830. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (1974). "Cargo Cult Science" (PDF). Engineering and Science 37 (7). http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/02/CargoCult.pdf. 
• Feynman, Richard P.; Kleinert, Hagen (1986). "Effective classical partition functions". Phys. Rev., A 34 (6): 5080–5084. December 1986. Bibcode 1986PhRvA..34.5080F. DOI:10.1103/PhysRevA.34.5080. PMID 9897894. 

Textbooks and lecture notes[link]

The Feynman Lectures on Physics is perhaps his most accessible work for anyone with an interest in physics, compiled from lectures to Caltech undergraduates in 1961–64. As news of the lectures’ lucidity grew, a number of professional physicists and graduate students began to drop in to listen. Co-authors Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands, colleagues of Feynman, edited and illustrated them into book form. The work has endured, and is useful to this day. They were edited and supplemented in 2005 with “Feynman’s Tips on Physics: A Problem-Solving Supplement to the Feynman Lectures on Physics” by Michael Gottlieb and Ralph Leighton (Robert Leighton’s son), with support from Kip Thorne and other physicists.

• Feynman, Richard P. (1970). The Feynman Lectures on Physics: The Definitive and Extended Edition. 3 volumes (2nd ed.). Addison Wesley (published 2005, originally published as separate volumes in 1964 and 1966). ISBN 0-8053-9045-6.  Includes Feynman’s Tips on Physics (with Michael Gottlieb and Ralph Leighton), which includes four previously unreleased lectures on problem solving, exercises by Robert Leighton and Rochus Vogt, and a historical essay by Matthew Sands.
• Feynman, Richard P. (1961). Theory of Fundamental Processes. Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-8053-2507-7. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (1962). Quantum Electrodynamics. Addison Wesley. ISBN 978-0-8053-2501-0. 
• Feynman, Richard P.; Hibbs, Albert (1965). Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals. McGraw Hill. ISBN 0-07-020650-3. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (1967). The Character of Physical Law: The 1964 Messenger Lectures. MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-56003-8. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (1981). Statistical Mechanics: A Set of Lectures. Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-8053-2509-3. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (1985b). QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-02417-0. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (1987). Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics: The 1986 Dirac Memorial Lectures. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-34000-4. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (1995). Brian Hatfield. ed. Lectures on Gravitation. Addison Wesley Longman. ISBN 0-201-62734-5. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (1997). Feynman’s Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun (Vintage Press ed.). London: Vintage. ISBN 0-09-973621-7. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (2000). Tony Hey and Robin W. Allen. ed. Feynman Lectures on Computation. Perseus Books Group. ISBN 0-7382-0296-7. 

Popular works[link]

• Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character, with contributions by Ralph Leighton, W. W. Norton & Co, 1985, ISBN 0-393-01921-7.
• What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character, with contributions by Ralph Leighton, W. W. Norton & Co, 1988, ISBN 0-393-02659-0.
• No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman, ed. Christopher Sykes, W. W. Norton & Co, 1996, ISBN 0-393-31393-X.
• Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher, Perseus Books, 1994, ISBN 0-201-40955-0.
• Six Not So Easy Pieces: Einstein’s Relativity, Symmetry and Space-Time, Addison Wesley, 1997, ISBN 0-201-15026-3.
• The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist, Perseus Publishing, 1999, ISBN 0-7382-0166-9.
• The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman, edited by Jeffrey Robbins, Perseus Books, 1999, ISBN 0-7382-0108-1.
• Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character, edited by Ralph Leighton, W. W. Norton & Co, 2005, ISBN 0-393-06132-9. Chronologically reordered omnibus volume of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?, with a bundled CD containing one of Feynman’s signature lectures.
• Quantum Man, Atlas books, 2011, Lawrence M. Krauss, ISBN 978039306471

Audio and video recordings[link]

• Safecracker Suite (a collection of drum pieces interspersed with Feynman telling anecdotes)
• Los Alamos From Below (audio, talk given by Feynman at Santa Barbara on February 6, 1975)
• Six Easy Pieces (original lectures upon which the book is based)
• Six Not So Easy Pieces (original lectures upon which the book is based)
• The Feynman Lectures on Physics: The Complete Audio Collection
• Samples of Feynman’s drumming, chanting and speech are included in the songs “Tuva Groove (Bolur Daa-Bol, Bolbas Daa-Bol)” and “Kargyraa Rap (Dürgen Chugaa)” on the album Back Tuva Future, The Adventure Continues by Kongar-ool Ondar. The hidden track on this album also includes excerpts from lectures without musical background.
• The Messenger Lectures, given at Cornell in 1964, in which he explains basic topics in physics. Available on Project Tuva for free (See also the book The Character of Physical Law)
• Take the world from another point of view [videorecording] / with Richard Feynman; Films for the Hu (1972)
• The Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures Four public lectures of which the four chapters of the book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter are transcripts. (1979)
• The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1981) (not to be confused with the later published book of same title)
• Richard Feynman: Fun to Imagine Collection, BBC Archive of 6 short films of Feynman talking in a style that is accessible to all about the physics behind common to all experiences. (1983)
• Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics (1986)
• The Last Journey of a Genius, a BBC TV production in association with WGBH Boston (1989)
• Tiny Machines: The Feynman Talk on Nanotechnology (video, 1984)
• Computers From the Inside Out (video)
• Quantum Mechanical View of Reality: Workshop at Esalen (video, 1983)
• Idiosyncratic Thinking Workshop (video, 1985)
• Bits and Pieces — From Richard’s Life and Times (video, 1988)
• Strangeness Minus Three (video, BBC Horizon 1964)
• No Ordinary Genius (video, Cristopher Sykes Documentary)
• Richard Feynman — The Best Mind Since Einstein (video, Documentary)
• The Motion of Planets Around the Sun (audio, sometimes titled “Feynman’s Lost Lecture”)
• Nature of Matter (audio)

See also[link]

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Bethe, Hans A. (1991). The Road from Los Alamos. Masters of Modern Physics. 2. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-671-74012-1. OCLC 24734608. 
• Edwards, Steven Alan (2006). The Nanotech Pioneers. Wiley. ISBN 978-3-527-31290-0. OCLC 64304124. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (1985). Ralph Leighton. ed. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character. W. W. Norton & Co. ISBN 0-393-01921-7. OCLC 10925248. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (1986). Rogers Commission Report, Volume 2 Appendix F- Personal Observations on Reliability of Shuttle. NASA. http://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm. 
• Feynman, Richard P. (1987). Ralph Leighton. ed. "Mr. Feynman Goes to Washington". Engineering and Science (Caltech) 50 (1): 6–22. http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/48/2/1987Feynman.pdf. ^{[dead link]}
• Feynman, Richard P. (1988). Ralph Leighton. ed. What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character. W. W. Norton & Co. ISBN 0-393-02659-0. 
• Feynman, Michelle, ed. (2005). Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman. Basic Books. ISBN 0-7382-0636-9. http://books.google.com/?id=HpgNSVS6fUYC&pg=PA350&dq=feynman+atheist. , foreword by Timothy Ferris. (Published in the UK under the title: Don’t You Have Time to Think?, with additional commentary by Michelle Feynman, Allen Lane, 2005, ISBN 0-7139-9847-4.)
• Gribbin, John; Gribbin, Mary (1997). Richard Feynman: A Life in Science. Dutton. ISBN 0-525-94124-X. 
• Nobel Foundation (1972). "Richard P. Feynman, The Nobel Prize in Physics 1965: Biography". Nobel Lectures, Physics: 1963–1970. Amsterdam: Elsevier. ISBN 978-0-444-40993-5. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1965/feynman-bio.html. 
• Gleick, James (1992). Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. Pantheon Books. ISBN 0-679-40836-3. OCLC 243743850. 
• Hey, Tony; Walters, Patrick (1987). The quantum universe. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-31845-7. 
• Hillis, W. Daniel (1989). "Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine". Physics Today (Institute of Physics) 42 (2): 78. Bibcode 1989PhT....42b..78H. DOI:10.1063/1.881196. http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0504.html?printable=1. 
• Leighton, Ralph (2000). Tuva Or Bust!:Richard Feynman’s last journey. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-32069-3. 
• LeVine, Harry (2009). The Great Explainer: The Story of Richard Feynman. Greensboro, North Carolina: Morgan Reynolds. ISBN 978-1-59935-113-1. 
• Schwinger, Julian (ed.) (1958). Selected Papers on Quantum Electrodynamics. Dover. ISBN 0-486-60444-6. http://books.google.com/books/about/Selected_papers_on_quantum_electrodynami.html?id=eYrl07GPkYkC. 
• Sykes, Christopher (1996). No ordinary genius : the illustrated Richard Feynman. New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-03621-9. 
• "Anti-Clock(1979)". http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0166996/. 

Further reading[link]

Articles[link]

• Physics Today, American Institute of Physics magazine, February 1989 Issue. (Vol.42, No.2.) Special Feynman memorial issue containing non-technical articles on Feynman’s life and work in physics.

Books[link]

• Brown, Laurie M. and Rigden, John S. (editors) (1993) Most of the Good Stuff: Memories of Richard Feynman Simon and Schuster, New York, ISBN 0-88318-870-8. Commentary by Joan Feynman, John Wheeler, Hans Bethe, Julian Schwinger, Murray Gell-Mann, Daniel Hillis, David Goodstein, Freeman Dyson, and Laurie Brown
• Dyson, Freeman (1979) Disturbing the Universe. Harper and Row. ISBN 0-06-011108-9. Dyson’s autobiography. The chapters “A Scientific Apprenticeship” and “A Ride to Albuquerque” describe his impressions of Feynman in the period 1947–48 when Dyson was a graduate student at Cornell
• Gleick, James (1992) Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. Pantheon. ISBN 0-679-74704-4
• Krauss, Lawrence M. (2011) Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science. W.W. Norton & Company. 350 pages, biography. ISBN 0-393-06471-9, OCLC 601108916
• LeVine, Harry, III (2009) The Great Explainer: The Story of Richard Feynman (Profiles in Science series) Morgan Reynolds, Greensboro, North Carolina, ISBN 978-1-59935-113-1; for high school readers
• Mehra, Jagdish (1994) The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-853948-7
• Gribbin, John and Gribbin, Mary (1997) Richard Feynman: A Life in Science. Dutton, New York, ISBN 0-525-94124-X
• Milburn, Gerard J. (1998) The Feynman Processor: Quantum Entanglement and the Computing Revolution Perseus Books, ISBN 0-7382-0173-1
• Mlodinow, Leonard (2003) Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search For Beauty In Physics And In Life Warner Books. ISBN 0-446-69251-4 Published in the United Kingdom as Some Time With Feynman
• Ottaviani, Jim and Myrick, Leland (2011) Feynman. First Second. ISBN 978-1-59643-259-8 OCLC 664838951.
• Schweber, Silvan S. (1994) “Chapter 8: Richard Feynman and the Visualization of Space-Time Processes” QED and the Men Who Made It: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga (Princeton Series in Physics) Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, pp. 373–473, ISBN 0-691-03685-3
• Sykes, Christopher, ed., (1994) No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman. W W Norton & Co. Inc. ISBN 0-393-03621-9

Films and plays[link]

• Infinity, a movie directed by Matthew Broderick and starring Matthew Broderick as Feynman, depicting Feynman’s love affair with his first wife and ending with the Trinity test. 1996.
• Parnell, Peter (2002) “QED” Applause Books, ISBN 978-1-55783-592-5, (play).
• Whittell, Crispin (2006) “Clever Dick” Oberon Books, (play)
• “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out” A film documentary autobiography of Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate and theoretical physicist extraordinary. 1982, BBC TV ‘Horizon’ and PBS ‘Nova’ (50 minute film). See Christopher Sykes Productions
• “The Quest for Tannu Tuva”, with Richard Feynman and Ralph Leighton. 1987, BBC TV ‘Horizon’ and PBS ‘Nova’ (entitled “Last Journey of a Genius”) (50 minute film)
• “No Ordinary Genius” A two-part documentary about Feynman’s life and work, with contributions from colleagues, friends and family. 1993, BBC TV ‘Horizon’ and PBS ‘Nova’ (a one-hour version, under the title “The Best Mind Since Einstein”) (2 × 50 minute films)

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Richard Feynman

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Richard Feynman

• Feynman's Scholar Google profile
• About Richard Feynman
• 14 minute talk about Dick Feynman by his friend Leonard Susskind
• Gallery of Drawings by Richard P. Feynman
• Biography and Bibliographic Resources, from the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, United States Department of Energy
• Richard Feynman at TED Conferences
• Richard Feynman at the Internet Movie Database
• Works by or about Richard Feynman in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Works by Richard Feynman on Open Library at the Internet Archive
• Richard Feynman collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• Richard Feynman collected news and commentary at The Guardian

Detail of William and Mary from the ceiling of the Painted Hall

The phrase William and Mary usually refers to the coregency over the Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland, of first-cousins King William III & II and Queen Mary II. Their joint reign began in February 1689, when they were offered the throne by the Parliament of England, replacing James II & VII, Mary's father and William's uncle/father-in-law, who was "deemed to have fled" the country in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. After Mary died in 1694, William ruled alone until his death in 1702. William and Mary were childless and were ultimately succeeded by Mary's younger sister, Anne.

Historic influence[link]

To end the Glorious Revolution, William and Mary signed the English Bill of Rights and began a new co-operation between the Parliament and the monarchs, leading to a greater measure of personal liberty and democracy in Britain. This action both signaled the end of several centuries of tension and conflict between the crown and parliament, and the end of the idea that England would be restored to Roman Catholicism, King William being a Protestant leader. The English Bill of Rights also inspired the English colonists in North America to revolt against the rule of James II and his proposed changes in colonial governance. These colonial revolts occurred in Massachusetts, New York, and Maryland.^[1]

See also[link]

• Philip II of Spain and Mary I of England
• Francis II of France and Mary, Queen of Scots

References[link]