Born in Far Rockway, in the New York City area in 1918, Feynman attended MIT and Princeton University, and went to Los Alamos in 1942 to work on the first atomic bombs upon graduation.

Beginning work there as a "number-cruncher," calculating critical mass of the bombs and how much uranium and plutonium would be needed. Impressing his superiors with his work, he was promoted to head of the Los Alamos theoretical division. He was responsible for a breakthrough in the method of safely disposing of radioactive waste that was probably responsible for the saving of many lives.

After Los Alamos, Feynman went to Cornell and then Caltech to teach. During this time he was responsible for breakthroughs in the field of Quantumelectrodynamics, the mechanism by which electrons interact with each other through the electromagnetic force. This work was to earn him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965.

Feynman was widely known for his insatiable curiosity and puckish sense of humor. One of his books, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" spent 14 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in 1985. Among the many anecdotes concerning his pranks, the best known may be his taunting of Los Alamos security officials by picking the locks of the classified filing cabinets and leaving notes to Security that their system was ineffectual against him. It's also been reported that he trained columns of ants to march to his bidding.

Feynman had a keen interest in magic and was a friend of The Amazing Randi, who was flabbergasted on several occasions to find that Feynman could figure out one of Randi's tricks in just a few minutes of concentrated thought.

Feynman was a member of the Rogers Commission following the Challenger disaster and was responsible for a key point of the investigation. By dunking a piece of the rocket booster's O-ring material in a glass of ice water, he was able to prove that the material lost its resiliency at low temperatures.

The experience of being on the shuttle commission interested him in the theory of management, and Feynman was quoted as saying that if he had his academic career to start over, he'd study management of large organizations such as NASA, rather than physics.

Feynman died February 15, 1988, after an eight-year battle with abdominal cancer. His last words were reported to have been "I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring."