Former Caltech president Marvin Goldberger, now director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.: "a towering figure in 20th century physics, always curious, always modest, always ebullient, always willing to share his deep insights with students and colleagues."
David Goodstein : "His scientific contributions were profound. They are not ordinary. They are not similar to other people's. He imposed his personality and his view on the world of science; he reformulated quantum mechanics, he virtually reinvented it. And gave it to us in a form that's still widely used throughout theoretical physics, in every field."
Richard Feynman: "My mother [Lucille Phillips] taught me that the highest forms of understanding that we can achieve are laughter and human compassion".
General Donald Kutyna: "Feynman had three things going for him. Number one, tremendous intellect, and that was well known around the world. Second, integrity... Third, he brought this driving desire to get to the bottom of any mystery. No matter where it took him, he was going to get there, and he was not deterred by any roadblocks in the way. He was a courageous guy, and he wasn't afraid to say what he meant."
MIT physicist Philip Morrison : "[Feynman was ] extraordinarily honest with himself and everyone else, . . . he didn't like ceremony or pomposity . . . he was extremely informal. He liked colorful language and jokes."
Richard Feynan was born may 11, 1918 in Manhattan,. He received his Bachelors of Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1939, and Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1942. At Princeton he worked on the atomic bomb project and revolutionized scientific approaches to quantum mechanics.He then worked, for two years, as the youngest member of the team at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, that developed the first atomic bomb.
For the next five years he worked as the chair of theoretical physics at Cornell University, and then as such at the California Institute of Technology, where he continued working until the end of he life.
He received numerous awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1965, wrote many best selling books, helped a small country named Tuva, was noted for his bongo drumming skills and witty lectures, and played a key role in the Rogers Commission hearings on the Challenger space shuttle accident in 1986.
He was married three times, succeeded by Gweneth Howarth and his two children by her, Carl Richard, and Michelle Catherine.
He died at age 69 of abdominal cancer, eight years after diagnosis.
From his doctoral work on quantum mechanics, he developed Feynman Diagrams" to explain rates for electromagnetic and weak interaction particle processes. One of the things that made Feynman Diagrams, and much of his other work, remarkable was the fact that Feynman took a more visual approach to physics, avoiding complicated manipulation of equations in favor of more easily understood diagrams. Feynman Diagrams are still used as the standard method for describing particle interactions and radiation from particle processes. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize of 1965 with two other scientists who, independently, had also worked on developing the theories of quantum electrodynamics.In 1986, he explained these theories for a public audience in his book, "QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter." Further, Feynman was quoted as calling his Nobel Prize, "a pain in the neck."
Feynman's most famous incident occurred when he became annoyed with the lengthy procedures and unclear witness explanations involving the 1986 Shuttle disaster, and performed an experiment with a rocket booster's o-ring and a glass of water. He showed that even by chilling the material of the o-ring by this slight degree, the material became breakable even by the pressure of human hands. Feynman was quoted in the final report as accusing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of "playing Russian roulette" with astronauts' lives.
While developing the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, Feynman spent his spare time teaching himself how to pick locks and practiced on the classified information, filing cabinets. Although he did not remove files, he frequently left teasing notes for officials to let them know that their security was easily breached.
The following is a quote of Feynman using his bongo drum playing as an example in explanation:
"The fact that I beat a drum has nothing to do with the fact that I do theoretical physics. Theoretical physics is a human endeavor, one of the higher developments of human beings - and this perpetual desire to prove that people who do it are human by showing that they do other things that a few other humans do (like playing bongo drums) is insulting to me."
In his lectures, Feynman often referred to his parents' teaching. In particular, his father, Melville Feynman, was often noted for encouraging his son's interest in science by explaining how various phenomena around him worked. The following is a quote from Feynman about one example of his father's teaching:"'See that bird?' he says, 'It's a Spencer's warbler. (I knew he didn't know the real name.) 'Well, in Italian, it's a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it's a Bom da Peida. In Chinese it's a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese it's a Katano Takeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You'll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing - that's what counts!"