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Richard Feynman (1918-88)

Richard Philips Feynman was without doubt one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century - but it doesn't end there. He was a brilliant raconteur, a remarkable populariser of science and a showman.

This last came out in his dramatic revelation of the o-ring problem when part of the team investigating the Challenger shuttle disaster. Rather than reveal his theory in quiet, careful prose, he dunked an o-ring into an iced water carafe at the hearing in front of the TV cameras.

Feynman was born in New York City on the 11th May 1918 and by the age of 12 was the local expert on radios, mending the cranky valve devices for friends and neighbours. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he obtained his B.Sc. in 1939 and at Princeton University where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1942. He was a research assistant at Princeton and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Cornell University and the California Institute of Technology. In 1965 he won the Nobel Prize for Physics along with Tomonaga and Schwinger for his work on Quantum Electrodynamics.

It was typical of the Feynman spirit that, while studying physics at a postgraduate level and faced with a bit of spare time he took an undergraduate course in biology. His science was always as much delight and inspiration as hard work.

During the war he was involved in the atomic bomb project, where he famously spent his spare time working out how to break into safes and locked filing cabinets to demonstrate the weakness of the security (and let's face it, for fun).

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