Richard P. Feynman 1918-1988

Abstract

Richard Feynman, simply put, was a genius. His quick wit and uncommon grasp of physics meant that any research area he encountered, he quickly mastered. Despite the fact that his own area of research was not geophysics, his life and work influenced almost all of us. Virtually every physics graduate student who started in the mid 60s or later was exposed to his Lectures on Physics, either by having them as a text for a course or by using them (as I did) to bone up for oral qualifying exams. Feynman diagrams appear in nearly every modern quantum mechanics textbook and are featured in his official Caltech portrait, which illustrates this article.

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