Richard P. Feynman was one of this century's most brilliant theoretical physicists and original thinkers. Born in Far Rockaway, New York, in 1918, he studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he graduated with a BS in 1939. He went on to Princeton and received his PhD. in 1942. During the war years he worked at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. He became Professor of Theoretical Physics at Cornell University, where he worked with Hans Bethe.

He basically rebuilt the theory of quantum electrodynamics and for this work shared the Nobel Prize in 1965. His simplified rules of calculation became standard tools of theoretical analysis in both quantum electrodynamics and high-energy physics. Feynman was a visiting professor at the Californian Institute of Technology in 1950 and later that year accepted a permanent faculty appointment. He became Richard Chance Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics in 1959. Over the years he worked with Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann.

Feynman had an extraordinary ability to communicate his science to audiences at all levels and was a well-known and popular lecturer. Series of his lectures were collected and published; these included The Feynman Lectures on Physics and QED, as well as The Character of Physical Laws from which this citation is taken. His memoires Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman were published in 1985 and became a surprising bestseller.

Richard Feynman died in 1988 after a long illness. Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, called Richard Feynman 'the most original mind of his generation', while The New York Times in its obituary described him as 'arguably the most brilliant, iconoclastic and influential of the postwar generation of theoretical physicists'.