Richard Feynman (11 May 1918-15 February 1988) was an American theoretical physicist and participant in the Manhattan Project.
Biography[]
Richard Feynman was born in Queens, New York City, New York in 1918, the son of a Belarusian-Jewish immigrant father and a mother of Polish-Jewish descent. Feynman was an avowed atheist from a young age, and he was a prodigy as a youth, teaching himself trigonometry, advanced algebra, infinite series, analytic geometry, and both differential and integral calculus at the age of 15. He became a scholar at Princeton before working on the Manhattan Project during World War II, despite not yet earning a graduate degree. He developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles, and, in the years following the war, he became one of the best-known scientists n the world and one of the highest-reputed physicists in history. His contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics earned him a Nobel Prize in 1965, and he became widely known to the public in the 1980s as a member of the panel that investigated the space shuttle Challenger disaster of 1986. He died in Los Angeles in 1988.