He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an undergraduate when he was a seventeen years old. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 1942. He later held an appointment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an assistant professor of physics.
Fearing that Germany would develop an atomic bomb before the United States, Feynman eventually signed on to Wilson’s isotron project to separate Uranium 235 from Uranium 238.
Feynman later was recruited by Julius Robert Oppenheimer to work on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos., New Mexico.
Feynman was known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics and the physics of the super-fluidity of super-cooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics.
For his contributions to the devolvement of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and Sino-Itiro Tomonaga, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965.
Feynman’s mathematical notation system for QED was accepted by the physics community over the systems developed by Schwinger and Tomonaga and his method of graphically drawing particle interaction, in what came to be dubbed Feynman diagrams.
Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988)
