Richard Feynman Born in New York City

Summary

Richard Phillips Feynman was born on May 11, 1918, in New York City and grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens. He studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned his doctorate at Princeton University. During World War II, Feynman worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project. After the war he taught at Cornell University and then the California Institute of Technology. His research made fundamental contributions to quantum electrodynamics, including the graphical calculation tools now known as Feynman diagrams. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga for work on quantum electrodynamics. Feynman also contributed to superfluidity, particle physics, and quantum computing concepts and became famous as an unusually engaging teacher. In 1986, he served on the commission investigating the Challenger space shuttle disaster and publicly demonstrated the vulnerability of the shuttle's O-ring seals to cold temperatures.