Richard Feynman (May 11, 1918 - February 15, 1988)
Richard Feynman was a Nobel laureate in physics, a best-selling author and member of the presidential commission that investigated the Challenger disaster. He was a popular lecturer who was widely known for his insatiable curiosity, gentle wit, brilliant mind and playful temperament. The New York Times called him, "arguably the most brilliant, iconoclastic and influential of the postwar generation of theoretical physicists."
His 1985 book, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, was on the New York Times best-seller list for 14 weeks. the "Altered States" chapter in the book described taking marijuana and ketamine at John Lilly's sensory deprivation tanks, as a means of studying consciousness. "Ordinarily it would take me about fifteen minutes to get a hallucination going," wrote Feynman, "but on a few occasions, when I smoked some marijuana beforehand, it came very quickly."
Feynman shared the Nobel Prize in 1965 for reconstructing almost the whole of quantum mechanics and electrodynamics, deriving a way to analyze atomic interactions through simple diagrams, a method that is still used widely. He was also a member of the team that developed the first atomic bomb at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory.
On May 4, 2005, the United States Postal Service issued a Richard Feynman stamp.