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Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman is one the of greatest theoretical physicists of the post-war era. He was one of the first men to make strides in Quantum Electrodynamics (QED).

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Photo of Richard Feynman (c) CC BY-SA 3.0

Physics

Feynman pioneered the famous Feynman diagrams, which are visual representations depicting the behavior of subatomic particles. They’re really useful as visual aids and helping to describe particle interactions without the use of complicated mathematics.

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A simple Feynman Diagram (c) CC BY-SA 3.0

Personal Life

His humorous and colorful personality is something that made him unique and a very likable person as described by his colleagues. Feynman married 3 different times. His first marriage was with his high school sweetheart but it ended after 2 years when she died.

Then he married Mary Louise Bell but that marriage also ended in 1958.

His final marriage was with Gweneth Margaret Howarth who was a freelance landscape artist. Sadly, their marriage also ended when she died in 1988. He had 2 children with her, Michelle Feynman and Carl Feynman.

Richard Feynman entered a highly competitive field filled with intellectual giants doing groundbreaking research. Paul Dirac, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, John Wheeler, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrodinger were all conducting research in the same field and at the same time as him. As a man who was newly entering quantum physics, it must have been very difficult to secure a research position and establish a name when all of these intellectual geniuses where doing research at the same time. However, Feynman’s brilliance and talent in physics broke through, and he cemented himself as a great physicist with profound ideas.

Notably, Feynman’s work in QED led him to win a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1962. Overall, he is an amazing role model for other men who want to earn a Nobel Prize for work in QED.

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