With the brain of a stereotypical nerd and the personality of a mischievous troublemaker, Richard Feynman was a paradox of his own.
Born in Queens, New York, on the 11th of May, 1918, Richard Feynman was nothing less than a child prodigy. During his high school years, Feynman mastered integral and differential calculus and independently derived various complex mathematical concepts.
He received an undergraduate degree in physics at MIT and a doctorate at Princeton for the same. He soon joined the Manhattan Project – a research project during WWII that developed nuclear weapons – and became the youngest group leader at 24 in the theoretical division. Even Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe named him the smartest guy in Los Alamos.
He then became a professor at CalTech University and was loved for his enthralling style of teaching, one filled with storytelling. However, he was known for often rushing, or skipping entirely, the “obvious” steps and genuinely couldn’t understand why students couldn’t keep up. Feynman also notably worked on the Space Shuttle Challenger, as he could explain literal rocket science in simple terms and boil it down to the basic rules of ‘states of matter’.
However, from playing the Bongo drums to having published more than five books, Feynman’s brilliance doesn’t end at science.
While his work in physics was published in ‘The Feynman Lectures’ series, his personal life is captured in two of his books: ‘Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman’ and ‘What Do You Care What Other People Think’. In the former, he tells stories of picking locks of Nobel Laureates in the Manhattan Project and sitting in classes for subjects he wasn’t even enrolled in college – Feynman completely shatters the image of a straight-jacketed physicist!
His famous quote, “I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder why I wonder; I wonder why….” (It could go on forever), sums up his mindset pretty well: never stop questioning. Feynman questioned everything and spoke his thoughts, with no fear of causing controversies or going against authorities, typical of a genius of his calibre.
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