Richard Feynman
Born: 11 May 1918 New York United States
Died: 15 February 1988 Los Angeles California
Academic Advisors: John Archibald Wheeler, Manuel Sandoval Vallarta
Influenced by: Paul Dirac, Ernst Mach, Seymour Benzer, John C. Slater, Roman Glazman, Eugene Jahnke
Early life:
Richard P. Feynman was born in Queens New York on 11 May 1918 to Jewish (although not practising) parents. By the age of only 15 years old he had mastered differential and integral calculus and occasionally re-created and experimented with mathematical topics such as the half-derivative before he even started to go to college.
Feynman earned a bachelor’s degree from the Massachusetts Institutes of Technology in 1939 and was named a Putnam Fellow that same year. He then received a PH.D from Princeton University in 1942, and in his theses applied the principle of stationary action to quantum mechanics, laying the foundation to (Path Integral) approach and the Feynman diagrams.
Career:
While researching his PH.D he married his first true love Arline Greenbaum, who was already diagnosed with tuberculosis. At Princeton Robert W. Wilson encouraged Feynman to participate in the Manhattan Project. He did so visiting his wife in a sanitarium in Albuquerque every weekend until she died in July 1945. He then immersed himself in work on the project and was present on the Trinity bomb test.
Hans Beth made the 24 year old Feynman a group leader theoretical division. ALthough his work on the project was relatively removed from the major action, Feynman did calculate neutron equations for the Los Alamos “Water Boiler”, a small nuclear reactor at the desert lab, in order to measure how close a particular assembly of fissile material was to becoming critical. After this work, he was transferred to the Oak ridge facility, where he aided engineers in calculating safety procedures for material storage so that inadvertent critical accidents could be avoided.
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