Feynman, Richard P.

American Physicist
1918–1988

Richard P. Feynman was born in 1918 in Far Rockaway, New York. He graduated with a bachelor of science degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1935, and he received a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1942. It was during this time that he began working on the Manhattan Project at New Mexico's Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, which resulted in the development of the first atomic bomb. While working on this team, he had his first experience with computers.

The project required many implosion calculations, which had to be done quickly and correctly. At the start, the group used Marchand hand calculators, but the devices kept breaking down and were very cumbersome. To speed up the process, one of the group's members, Stanley Frankel, decided to order some IBM business machines—adding machines called tabulators, for listing sums, and...