Richard Phillips Feynman was born on May 11, 1918 in New York City. He enrolled at the Far Rockaway High School, that was also the alma mater of fellow Nobel laureates Burton Richter and Baruch Samuel Blumberg.Upon starting high school, Richard was quickly promoted to a higher math class. An IQ test administered in high school estimated his IQ at 125, although if he had taken an IQ test as an adult, he probably would have scored much higher, since he later won Putnam Fellow status in the prestigious Putnam Examinations–a much greater challenge than an IQ test.
When Feynman was 15, he taught himself trigonometry, advanced algebra, infinite series, analytic geometry, and calculus. On graduation, he attended MIT majoring in mathematics, but later switched to electrical engineering, and then to physics. At age 25, he delivered a lecture on Some Interesting Properties of Numbers to the world’s most distinguished physicists, who were gathered together in Los Alamos to develop an atomic bomb. Among the ideas he discussed was Euler’s remarkable formula, eiπ + 1 = 0which he used to dazzle the physicists who were unaware of the “magic” of this equation.
Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. He is also known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium. In 1965 he received jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin’ichirō Tomonaga the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Later, reflecting on the aesthetics of mathematics, he wrote: To those who do not know mathematics, it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty of nature. … If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in.
