Feynman, Richard P. (Richard Phillips), 1918-1988

Richard Phillips Feynman; born on May 11, 1918, in Queens, New York City, to Lucille née Phillips, a homemaker, and Melville Arthur Feynman, a sales manager originally from Minsk in Belarus; attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he joined the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity; As an undergraduate, he published two papers in the Physical Review One of these, which was co-written with Manuel Vallarta, was titled "The Scattering of Cosmic Rays by the Stars of a Galaxy", the other was his senior thesis, on "Forces in Molecules", based on an idea by John C. Slater, who was sufficiently impressed by the paper to have it published. Today, it is known as the Hellmann–Feynman theorem; 1939, Feynman received a bachelor's degree, and was named a Putnam Fellow. He attained a perfect score on the graduate school entrance exams to Princeton University in physics—an unprecedented feat—and an outstanding score in mathematics, but did poorly on the history and English portions. The head of the physics department there, Henry D. Smyth, had another concern, writing to Philip M. Morse...; Attendees at Feynman's first seminar, which was on the classical version of the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory, included Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, and John von Neumann. Pauli made the prescient comment that the theory would be extremely difficult to quantize, and Einstein said that one might try to apply this method to gravity in general relativity, which Sir Fred Hoyle and Jayant Narlikar did much later as the Hoyle–Narlikar theory of gravity. Feynman received a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1942; his thesis advisor was John Archibald Wheeler. In his doctoral thesis titled "The Principle of Least Action in Quantum Mechanics,"; In 1941, with World War II raging in Europe but the United States not yet at war, Feynman spent the summer working on ballistics problems at the Frankford Arsenal in Pennsylvania. After the attack on Pearl Harbor had brought the United States into the war, Feynman was recruited by Robert R. Wilson, who was working on means to produce enriched uranium for use in an atomic bomb, as part of what would become the Manhattan Project; in early 1943, Robert Oppenheimer was establishing the Los Alamos Laboratory; At Los Alamos, Feynman was assigned to Hans Bethe's Theoretical (T) Division; He and Bethe developed the Bethe–Feynman formula for calculating the yield of a fission bomb; . With Stanley Frankel and Nicholas Metropolis, he assisted in establishing a system for using IBM punched cards for computation He invented a new method of computing logarithms that he later used on the Connection Machine; Feynman was sent to the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; He was sought out by physicist Niels Bohr for one-on-one discussions; On weekends he drove to Albuquerque to see Arline in a car borrowed from his friend Klaus Fuchs. Asked who at Los Alamos was most likely to be a spy, Fuchs mentioned Feynman's safe cracking and frequent trips to Albuquerque; Fuchs himself later confessed to spying for the Soviet Union. The FBI would compile a bulky file on Feynman; Feynman nominally held an appointment at the University of Wisconsin–Madison as an assistant professor of physics, but was on unpaid leave during his involvement in the Manhattan Project; started job at Cornell in 1943; Bacher, who had been instrumental in bringing Feynman to Cornell, had lured him to the California Institute of Technology; The US government nevertheless sent Feynman to Geneva for the September 1958 Atoms for Peace Conference; died on February 15, 1988, at age 69