Richard Feynman — physics (nobel) with roots in the Russian Empire
Richard Phillips Feynman was born in New York City on 11 May 1918; sources place the birth variously in Manhattan and in Queens. His connection to the Russian Empire runs through his father.
Melville Arthur Feynman (1890-1946) was born into a Jewish family in Minsk. His father, Jakob, known in America as Louis, was a Lithuanian Jew who had settled there, and in 1895 Jakob emigrated to the United States with his wife and five-year-old Melville. Melville became a sales manager for a uniform company. Richard's mother, Lucille Phillips (1895-1981), was born in the United States; her father had emigrated from Poland and built a successful business. Before Richard was born, Melville is reported to have said that if the child were a boy he would be a scientist, and he encouraged his son from an early age to ask questions and to challenge received answers.
The family moved to Far Rockaway, Queens, where Richard's sister Joan, nine years younger, was born; she became an astrophysicist. He studied at MIT, took his doctorate at Princeton in 1942 and worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project. After the war he taught at Cornell and from the early 1950s at the California Institute of Technology, where he remained until his death.
His diagrams for the interactions of particles and his path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics reshaped the way physicists calculate. In 1965 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichiro Tomonaga for their work on quantum electrodynamics. The Feynman Lectures on Physics, first published in 1963, are still in use. In 1986 he served on the presidential commission investigating the loss of the space shuttle Challenger, where he showed at a public hearing that the O-ring rubber lost its resilience when cold by dipping a clamped sample into a glass of ice water.
His last undertaking ran east. From the late 1970s he and his friend Ralph Leighton tried for years to travel to Tuva, a small land near Mongolia, then part of the Soviet Union, whose unusual stamps Feynman had collected as a boy. He died in Los Angeles on 15 February 1988 without making the journey; Leighton reached Tuva a few months later and told the story in Tuva or Bust!
"Father Melville Arthur Feynman (1890-1946), born in Minsk, emigrated to the United States in 1895, aged five, with his parents."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Minsk (now Belarus)
His father, Melville Arthur Feynman, was born in Minsk, then in the Russian Empire, and came to the United States in 1895 at the age of five with his parents; Melville's father, Jakob, was a Lithuanian Jew who had settled in Minsk.
Father Melville Arthur Feynman, born in Minsk to a Jewish family; his father Jakob (Louis) Feynman, a Lithuanian Jew, had settled in Minsk. Mother Lucille Phillips (1895-1981), born in the United States; her father had emigrated from Poland.
.svg?width=900)
Minsk (now Belarus). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.