Richard Feynman's school IQ test scored him at a merely respectable 125
A high school IQ test put Richard Feynman at 125, one point below his younger sister Joan, who later teased that she was the smarter sibling. He turned down Mensa, saying his score was too low. About thirty years later he shared the Nobel Prize for untangling how light and electrons interact.
Feynman was born in Queens on 11 May 1918 and did not talk until after he turned three. His father, a uniform sales manager who had emigrated from Minsk as a child, urged him to question received wisdom; his mother supplied his lifelong sense of humour. As a boy he fixed radios, rigged a burglar alarm at home, and at fifteen taught himself calculus, even inventing his own symbols for sine and cosine. He took his sister to see the northern lights, and Joan grew up to be an astrophysicist who helped explain them.
Columbia turned him away because of its quota on Jewish students, so he went to MIT, drifting from mathematics to electrical engineering and then to physics as a middle ground. An undergraduate paper on cosmic rays with Manuel Vallarta later appeared in the closing line of a Heisenberg book, to Feynman's glee. He made a perfect score on Princeton's physics entrance exam, and his first seminar there drew Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli and John von Neumann.
His 1942 thesis under John Wheeler applied the principle of least action to quantum mechanics and led toward path integrals and the diagrams now named for him, which picture a positron as an electron running backward in time. His scholarship forbade marriage, but once he had his doctorate he married his high school sweetheart Arline Greenbaum, then gravely ill with tuberculosis, at a Staten Island city office with two strangers as witnesses.
He went on to work on the wartime atomic bomb, explain superfluid helium, and share the 1965 Nobel Prize with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga. His Caltech lectures became a classic textbook, and a 1959 talk anticipated nanotechnology. In the 1980s he joined the commission investigating the Challenger shuttle disaster. He died in February 1988.
Source: Richard Feynman
