"Richard Feynman is one of the most iconic, influential and inspiring scientists of the 20th century. He helped design the atomic bomb, solved the mystery of the Challenger Shuttle catastrophe and won a Nobel Prize. Now, 25 years after his death - in his own words and those of his friends and family - this is the story of the most captivating communicator in the history of science" If you want to learn more about physics from the Greatest Physics Teacher in history, the Feynman Lectures on Physics are the best way to do so. http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ "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 "Upon starting high school, Feynman was quickly promoted into a higher math class and an unspecified school-administered IQ test estimated his IQ at 125—high, but "merely respectable" according to biographer James Gleick. When he turned 15, he taught himself trigonometry, advanced algebra, infinite series, analytic geometry, and both differential and integral calculus. Before entering college, he was experimenting with and deriving 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. 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 in Far Rockaway, Queens also attended by fellow laureates Burton Richter and Baruch Samuel Blumberg. 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. He applied to Columbia University but was not accepted because of their quota for the number of Jews admitted. 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. He attained 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. 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"." More about Richard Feynman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ http://www.feynman.com/ http://www.richardfeynman.com/ http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_feynman http://www.feynmanlectures.info/

• published: 21 Mar 2015
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