Richard Fillips Feynman

Richard Phillips Feynman (Fainman) was an outstanding American physicist. He was one of the creators of quantum electrodynamics. In 1943–1945 he was among those developing the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. He developed the path integral method in quantum mechanics (1948), as well as the so-called Feynman diagram method (1949) in quantum field theory, by means of which the transformations of elementary particles can be explained. He proposed the parton model of the nucleon (1969) and the theory of quantized vortices. He was a reformer of methods of teaching physics at the university level. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics (1965, jointly with S. Tomonaga and J. Schwinger).

The American physicist Richard Phillips Feynman was born in New York City, to Melville Arthur Feynman and Lucille Phillips, née Phillips. Together with his younger sister, he grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens (a borough of New York City). Feynman’s father, head of sales at a uniform-manufacturing factory, had a deep interest in the natural sciences and encouraged his son to conduct experiments in a home laboratory. Together with a school friend, Feynman staged performances for neighbors, demonstrating simple chemical tricks. Even while still a high school student, he earned money for small expenses by repairing radio receivers. Becoming captain of the school algebra team, Feynman discovered an ability to solve difficult mathematical puzzles quickly by viewing them as a whole and avoiding cumbersome calculations.

After graduating from high school in 1935, Feynman entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and in 1939 graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physics. At MIT, Feynman later recalled, he realized that “the most important problem of that time was the unsatisfactory state of the quantum theory of electricity and magnetism (quantum electrodynamics).” Quantum electrodynamics studies interactions between elementary particles and between particles and the electromagnetic field.

Many propositions of the theory existing at that time, created by Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and P. A. M. Dirac, received brilliant confirmation, but there were also points in its structure that were not entirely clear, such as the infinite mass and infinite charge of the electron. Feynman began to develop radically new theoretical