Richard Feynman
He reformulated quantum electrodynamics; he invented Feynman diagrams
His father Melville was born in Minsk and came to America at five.
And here is why this article cannot do without one passage. In 1965 Feynman refused in writing to be included in a book about Jewish Nobel laureates. He wrote that "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", and that at thirteen he had rejected both the religion and the idea of a chosen people.
He stands in this reference—and his refusal is printed in it, because otherwise the list would be doing exactly what he objected to. A reader has the right to know both that Feynman was a Jew and what he thought of such lists; to suppress the second so as to make the first more comfortable would be dishonest.
Sources
Documents of the period
- Rabbi Feynman's letter refusing inclusion in a book on Jewish laureates, 1965 — “to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory”
Scholarship
- NobelPrize.org, the 1965 Physics prize — with Schwinger and Tomonaga, for quantum electrodynamics
Basis: documents and evidence.