Richard Phillips Feynman Alyona Bondar 11-A

American theoretical physicist who was probably the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in his field in the post-World War II era.

Born in New York, Feynman was the descendant of Russian and Polish Jews who had immigrated to the United States late in the 19th century. He studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II and became known to a wide public in the 1980s as a member of the Rogers Commission.

Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in He was one of the first people to study quantum physics and he started a new branch of science, called quantum electrodynamics.

He died of cancer on the 15 th of February in 1988 in Los Angeles, California.

During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal Physics World he was ranked as one of the ten greatest physicists of all time.