Birthday of Richard Feynman (1918)

Richard Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics — a sum over all possible histories of a particle, weighted by quantum phase. He invented Feynman diagrams: pictorial representations of particle interactions that encode complex integrals, making calculations tractable. His Feynman Lectures on Physics remain the finest introduction to physics ever written. He was also famous for safecracking, bongo drumming, and the ability to explain quantum mechanics to anyone who genuinely wanted to understand it.