Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel prize in physics for quantum electrodynamics and was a celebrated teacher: The Feynman Lectures on Physics, from his Caltech courses of the early 1960s, are still used worldwide. His most famous public moment came at the 1986 Challenger inquiry, when he dropped a piece of O-ring rubber into iced water to show it lost its resilience. His short book QED explains quantum theory with almost no mathematics.