Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman was an American physicist. During his lifetime, he became one of the best-known scientists in the world. He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb. In 1965 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. Best known for laying the groundwork for the "path integral" approach in the formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics and particle physics, he is also credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing, and introducing the concept of nanotechnology.

His biographer, James Gleick, in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman wrote:

At twenty-three ... there was no physicist on earth who could match his exuberant command over the native materials of theoretical science. It was not just a facility at mathematics (though it had become clear ... that the mathematical machinery emerging from the Wheeler-Feynman collaboration was beyond Wheeler's own ability). Feynman seemed to possess a frightening ease with the substance behind the equations, like Albert Einstein at the same age, like the Soviet physicist Lev Landau—but few others.

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