May 11, 1918 - Birth of Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize who was able to convey the complexity of theoretical physics in a simple way

Richard Phillips Feynman was a unique genius who could not stand still when he found he did not understand something, he needed to understand even the smallest details of a problem in order to solve it. He possessed a great ability to see the simplicity of seemingly complicated things, a fabulous ability to appreciate the obvious.

Feynman studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and received his PhD in physics in 1942, with a paper on electromagnetic waves supervised by the American nuclear physicist John Wheeler. The audience included scientists such as Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Ernst Pauli, and John von Neumann.

In 1945, he moved to Cornell University as a professor of theoretical physics. Later, after his time as a visiting professor at the University of Rio de Janeiro, he became a professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, focusing his research on quantum electrodynamics, a discipline in which he developed quantum field theory.

His contributions to physics focused on quantum electrodynamics; he developed path integrals, studied the superfluidity of liquid helium, proposed the Parton model, and was a great populariser of science.

In 1965, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, together with Shin-Ichiro Tomonaga and Julian Schwinger.

If you want to know more about this scientist, click on the following link: Richard Feynman