Richard Feynman

She trained as a Primary school teacher but married Melville in 1917, before taking up a profession.

Feynman was a late talker and did not speak until after his third birthday.

As an adult, he spoke with a New York accent strong enough to be perceived as an affectation or exaggeration, so much so that his friends Wolfgang Pauli and Hans Bethe once commented that Feynman spoke like a "bum".

The young Feynman was heavily influenced by his father, who encouraged him to ask questions to challenge orthodox thinking, and who was always ready to teach Feynman something new.

From his mother, he gained the sense of humor that he had throughout his life.

As a child, he had a talent for engineering, maintained an experimental laboratory in his home, and delighted in repairing radios.

This radio repairing was probably the first job Feynman had, and during this time he showed early signs of an aptitude for his later career in theoretical physics, when he would analyze the issues theoretically and arrive at the solutions.

When he was in grade school, he created a home burglar alarm system while his parents were out for the day running errands.

When Richard was five, his mother gave birth to a younger brother, Henry Phillips, who died at age four weeks.

Four years later, Richard's sister Joan was born and the family moved to Far Rockaway, Queens.

Though separated by nine years, Joan and Richard were close, and they both shared a curiosity about the world.

Though their mother thought women lacked the capacity to understand such things, Richard encouraged Joan's interest in astronomy, and Joan eventually became an astrophysicist.

Feynman's parents were both from Jewish families, and his family went to the synagogue every Friday.

However, by his youth, Feynman described himself as an "avowed atheist".

Many years later, in a letter to Tina Levitan, declining a request for information for her book on Jewish Nobel Prize winners, he stated, "To select, for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory", adding, "at thirteen I was not only converted to other religious views, but I also stopped believing that the Jewish people are in any way 'the chosen people'".

Later in life, during a visit to the Jewish Theological Seminary, Feynman encountered the Talmud for the first time.

He saw that it contained the original text in a little square on the page, and surrounding it were commentaries written over time by different people.

In this way the Talmud had evolved, and everything that was discussed was carefully recorded.

Despite being impressed, Feynman was disappointed with the lack of interest for nature and the outside world expressed by the rabbis, who cared about only those questions which arise from the Talmud.

Feynman attended Far Rockaway High School, which was also attended by fellow Nobel laureates Burton Richter and Baruch Samuel Blumberg.

Upon starting high school, Feynman was quickly promoted to a higher math class.

An IQ test administered in high school estimated his IQ at 125—high but "merely respectable", according to biographer James Gleick.

His sister Joan, who scored one point higher, later jokingly claimed to an interviewer that she was smarter.

Years later he declined to join Mensa International, saying that his IQ was too low.

When Feynman was 15, he taught himself trigonometry, advanced algebra, infinite series, analytic geometry, and both differential and integral calculus.

Before entering college, he was experimenting with mathematical topics such as the half-derivative using his own notation.

Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as his work in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model.

Feynman was born on May 11, 1918, in New York City, to Lucille (Phillips; 1895–1981), a homemaker, and Melville Arthur Feynman (1890–1946), a sales manager.

Feynman's father was born into a Jewish family in Minsk, Russian Empire, and emigrated with his parents to the United States at the age of five.

Feynman's mother was born in the United States into a Jewish family.

Lucille's father had emigrated from Poland, and her mother also came from a family of Polish immigrants.

Feynman was a keen popularizer of physics through both books and lectures, including a 1959 talk on top-down nanotechnology called There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom and the three-volume publication of his undergraduate lectures, The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

Feynman also became known through his autobiographical books Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?, and books written about him such as Tuva or Bust! by Ralph Leighton and the biography Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick.

For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga.

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.

During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world.

He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II and became known to the wider public in the 1980s as a member of the Rogers Commission, the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

Along with his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing and introducing the concept of nanotechnology.

He held the Richard C. Tolman professorship in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology.

In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal Physics World, he was ranked the seventh-greatest physicist of all time.