On 11 May, Richard Feynman’s birthday, I had the privilege of attending the ceremony dedicating a stamp in his honor at the Far Rock-away Post Office in Queens, New York (see Physics Today, May 2005, page 30). Among the attendees were his son, Carl; daughter, Michelle; and many other Feynman relatives. Directly after the ceremony, one corner of Cornaga Avenue in Far Rock-away, a street on which he had lived, was named “Richard Feynman Way.”
The Feynman diagrams on the stamp show how Feynman’s work that was originally applicable to quantum electrodynamics, and for which he won the Nobel Prize, was later used to elucidate the electro-weak force. This force is illustrated on the stamp by vertex diagrams for the flavor-changing quark transitions emitting the W± boson, and flavor-conserving quark transitions emitting the Z0, where W± and Z0 represent respectively the charged and neutral intermediate vector bosons mediating the force.
Feynman’s letters have recently been published in a widely respected book edited and annotated by Michelle Feynman. 1 Besides corresponding with physicists, he also answered letters from people from all walks of life. While in high school, according to the book, he taught himself “gamma functions, elliptic functions and differentiating under an integral sign.” So it should be no surprise that as an undergraduate at MIT, Feynman was one of five national winners of the Putnam mathematics competition.
On the cover of a book written by Feynman and Ralph Leighton 2 is a photograph of Feynman, in which he wears a T-shirt showing the schematic of the parallel supercomputer Connection Machine CM-1, with chips connected in the shape of a hypercube (see photograph above). The idea for the machine was initiated at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab in the early 1980s. When Feynman heard of the project, he helped design the machine’s connecting network. Carl worked on the machine and its successors.
The US Postal Service sent Michelle a preliminary design of the Feynman stamp, by the artist Victor Stabin. Caltech’s Steven Frautschi and Leighton edited the Feynman diagrams for the final version. Who submitted the original diagrams that are the basis for the stamp remains a mystery.
