The Doctoral Students of Richard Feynman

T. S. Van Kortryk
120 Payne Street, Paris MO65275
arXiv:1801.04574v2 [physics.hist-ph] 24 Sep 2018

[email protected]

Abstract
I document 35 students who graduated to receive PhDs under Feynman’s supervision. I
provide links to their doctoral dissertations.

Introduction
An ordinary genius is an ordinary fellow ... There is no mystery as to how his mind
works. ... It is different with the magicians ... Even after we understand what they
have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if
ever, have students ... Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber.
— Mark Kac [1]

Since this is the centennial year of Richard Feynman’s birth, I attempt here to dispel a minor
myth about him. The myth is embodied in the words of Mark Kac that I have emphasized above,
and in the following statement attributed to one of Feynman’s students, Philip Platzman [2]: “The
reason why Feynman did not have many students was because he was very difficult with them,
because he didn’t really worry about students. ... He had a few students, but not many.”
Thus a prevailing belief in the scientific community seems to be [3] Feynman had very few
doctoral students who completed theses under his supervision. It may be surprising to most people
to learn this is not true.
The number of Feynman’s doctoral students is actually 35 ± 3, with the uncertainty intended
to take into account some unavailable documents as well as possible subjectivity on my part [4].
The lineup of students who completed their PhD research under Feynman’s discerning gaze began
in 1951 with Michel Baranger, Laurie Brown, and Giovanni Lomanitz at Cornell, and continued
until at least 1977 with Ted Barnes and Thomas Curtright at Caltech.
While 35 is not an extremely large number of doctoral students to have mentored during a
lifetime as an academic (e.g. compared to the 70+ dissertations supervised by Julian Schwinger
during five decades), nonetheless, 35 does amount on average to almost one PhD for every year of
Feynman’s time as a professor. Moreover, were it not for illness during the last several years of his
career, Feynman might have supervised several more students.
Among Feynman’s doctoral students the most recognized physicist is undoubtedly George Zweig,
who was also mentored by Murray Gell-Mann and Alvin Tollestrup, and who graduated from Cal-
tech in 1964. Soon thereafter Zweig had a major impact on elementary particle physics through
his independent invention of the “quark model” of hadrons. However, in my opinion, the research
of Feynman’s other students has also had significant impact and continues to influence several areas
of physics.

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The Students
There are PhDs and then there are Feynman PhDs. — Richard Sherman [2]

From theses and PhD dissertation examination documents wherein it was either explicitly stated
or otherwise clear that Feynman was the advisor∗ or co-advisor∗∗ , I find the 35 doctoral students
listed here, the first three at Cornell, the others at Caltech:

Michel Baranger∗∗ (1951) Relativistic Corrections to the Lamb Shift

Laurie Brown∗ (1951) Radiative corrections to the Klein-Nishina formula
Giovanni Lomanitz∗ (1951) Second order effects in the electron-electron interaction
Carl Wilhelm Hellstrom∗∗ (1951) Production and Annihilation of Antiprotons
Howard Murray Robbins∗∗ (1952) I. Retardation Corrections ... II. Self Energy ...
Albert Hibbs∗ (1955) The growth of water waves due to the action of the wind
William Karzas∗∗ (1955) The effects of atomic electrons on nuclear radiation
Koichi Mano∗ (1955) The self-energy of the scalar nucleon
Gerald Speisman∗ (1955) The neutron-proton mass difference
Truman Woodruff∗∗ (1955) On the orthogonalized plane wave method for calculating ...
Michael Cohen∗ (1956) The energy spectrum of the excitations in liquid helium
Samuel Berman∗ (1959) Radiative corrections to muon and neutron decay
Frank Vernon∗ (1959) The theory of a general quantum system interacting ... dissipative system
Willard Wells∗ (1959) Quantum theory of coupled systems having application to masers
Henry Hilton∗∗ (1960) Comparison of the beta-spectra of boron 12 and nitrogen 12
Carl Iddings∗ (1960) Nuclear size corrections to the hyperfine structure of hydrogen
Philip Platzman∗∗ (1960) Meson theoretical origins of the non-static two nucleon potential
Marvin Chester∗∗ (1961) Some experimental and theoretical observations on ... EMF
Elisha Huggins∗ (1962) Quantum mechanics of the interaction of gravity ...
Harold Yura∗ (1962) The quantum electrodynamics of a medium
Michael Levine∗∗ (1963) Neutrino processes of significance in stars
George Zweig∗∗ (1964) Two topics in elementary particle physics ...
James Bardeen∗∗ (1965) Stability and dynamics of spherically symmetric masses ...
Richard William Griffith∗∗ (1969) Chiral Symmetry Breaking: Meson and Nucleon Masses
Howard Arthur Kabakow∗∗ (1969) A perturbation procedure for nonlinear oscillations ...
Robert Carlitz∗∗ (1970) Elimination of parity doubled states from Regge amplitudes [5]
Mark Kislinger∗∗ (1970) Elimination of parity doublets in Regge amplitudes
E. William Colglazier, Jr.∗∗ (1971) Two Topics in Elementary Particle Physics
Finn Ravndal∗∗ (1971) A relativistic quark model with harmonic dynamics [6]
Richard Sherman∗ (1971) Surface impedance theory for superconductors in ... magnetic fields
Arturo Cisneros∗∗ (1973) I. Baryon-Antibaryon phase transition ... II. ... the Parton Model
Steven Kauffmann∗ (1973) Ortho-positronium annihilation ... first order radiative corrections
Robert Wang∗∗ (1976) A Study of Some Two-Dimensional Field Theory Models
Frank (Ted) Barnes∗∗ (1977) Quarks, gluons, bags, and hadrons
Thomas L. Curtright∗ (1977) Stability and Supersymmetry

From theses where Feynman was not described as an advisor or co-advisor, but was a member of
the PhD examination committee although not the committee chairman, and/or was acknowledged
in the work for moderate influence and/or general advice, I find in addition:

Fredrik Zachariasen (1956) Photodisintegration of the deuteron

Paul Craig (1959) Observations of perfect potential flow and critical velocities in superfluid ...

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 James Mercereau (1959) Diffraction of Thermal Waves in Liquid Helium II
Kenneth Wilson (1961) An investigation of the Low ... and the Chew-Mandelstam equations
John Andelin (1966) Superfluid drag in helium II
Karvel Thornber (1966) I. Electronic Processes ... II. Polaron Motion ...
Lorin Vant-Hull (1967) Verification of long range quantum phase coherence ...
William Press (1973) Applications of black-hole perturbation techniques
Don Page (1976) Accretion into and emission from black holes
Stephen Wolfram (1980) Some topics in theoretical high-energy physics

All of these were Caltech students. Originally I included Platzman in this second list. But upon
looking at other documents I became convinced that his thesis was effectively co-supervised by
Feynman to the extent that he belonged in the first list. (Indeed, as I document later, Platzman’s
personal listing in the Mathematics Genealogy Project states that Feynman was a co-advisor.)
Similar remarks apply for Robert Carlitz [5] and Finn Ravndal [6]. If so, that would justify my
head count of 35 “Feynman PhDs” to be a lower bound.
Finally, I find several less compelling cases where Feynman was only a member of the dissertation
examination committee at Caltech and was not particularly influential for the research, so far as
I can tell. I suspect there are many more such cases that I have not found, since on this point
documentation is quite often incomplete and all committee members are not listed. For example:

Lipes, Richard Gwin (1969) I. Application of multi-Regge theory ... II. High energy model ....
Hill, Christopher Thaddeus (1977) Higgs scalars and the nonleptonic weak interactions.
Dally, William J. (1986) A VLSI architecture for concurrent data structures. (restricted)
Wawrzynek, John (1987) VLSI concurrent computation for music synthesis. (restricted)

For the last two cases given above, I cannot access the theses to see if Feynman was acknowledged
for significant influence.

Sources
At the time of this writing, wikipedia lists only six students to have officially received PhDs with
Feynman as the advisor, in alphabetical order: James M. Bardeen, Laurie Brown, Thomas Cur-
tright, Al Hibbs, Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, and George Zweig. However, this list is obviously far
from complete, as documented by the Math Genealogy Project (MGP) and by the Caltech library
archives.
According to the MGP, also at the time of this writing, there were at least thirteen other doc-
toral degrees completed under Feynman’s supervision in addition to those listed in wikipedia. In
particular, Philip Platzman is in the MGP list but not in wikipedia. I suppose that is because he re-
quested MGP to classify him as a doctoral student of Feynman. Platzman’s personal listing in MGP
supports my supposition. By way of comparison, and as a measure of the completeness of their
database, Schwinger has only 21 of his students listed by the MGP.
In any case, the mother lode of information about Feynman’s doctoral students can be found
at the Caltech library. A direct search of their online database produces a list of 31 PhD theses
where Feynman is described as the advisor or co-advisor, at the time of this writing [8]. By way
of comparison, a direct search for Gell-Mann as advisor turns up 18 theses in the Caltech library
database. Among these, Hilton and Levine are shown to be co-advised by Feynman and Gell-Mann.
Remarkably, Zweig is not listed as a Gell-Mann advisee.
Beyond these publicly accessible sources, the largest amount of documentation that is available
to me concerns Thomas Curtright, who has provided this succinctly amusing excerpt from his thesis
examination committee papers [3]:

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Summary
From looking at many theses and papers by Caltech students, my overall impression is simply this:
Feynman played a major role through his mentoring and supervision of doctoral students. He
exerted tremendous influence on graduate student research conducted at Caltech during his four
decades there — perhaps even more than his widely perceived influence on Caltech undergraduate
studies. I conclude that it is not true Richard Feynman “had a few students, but not many.”

Acknowledgements: I thank Professor Curtright for suggesting that there could very well be
a widespread misunderstanding about the extent of Feynman’s mentoring of doctoral students.
Finally, I thank Cosmas Zachos for his comments on various drafts of this manuscript.

References
[1] M Kac, Enigmas of Chance: An Autobiography, University of California Press (1987).
[2] J Mehra, The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Oxford
University Press (1994)
[3] T Curtright, private communication.
[4] Regarding my subjectivity, see [5, 6, 8].
[5] Robert Carlitz’s thesis was not available from the Caltech library when I originally compiled
a list of Feynman’s doctoral students, but now it is. Therein I see that Carlitz’s advisor was
Steven Frautschi and Feynman was not described as a co-advisor. In fact, Carlitz did not
acknowledge Feynman for discussions at any point in his thesis — he only cited Feynman for an
unpublished 1967 lecture. However, the main points of Carlitz’s thesis involve research that was
carried out in collaboration with Mark Kislinger and published jointly with him in two papers.
Now, in his thesis, Kislinger does acknowledge Feynman as his primary advisor. Moreover,
in the second of his two papers with Carlitz, Kislinger “thanks R. P. Feynman for suggesting
investigating this problem and for numerous helpful discussions.” Therefore, I consider Carlitz
to have been co-advised by Feynman.
[6] Finn Ravndal’s advisor was also Steven Frautschi, officially. Frautschi was the chairman of
Ravndal’s dissertation examination committee, while Feynman was only a member of the
committee. On the other hand, upon reading the acknowledgements in Ravndal’s thesis
and considering what the entire thesis is about, it is clear that Feynman provided consid-
erable guidance to Ravndal (also see [7]). Indeed, much of the research in the thesis was
published jointly with Feynman and also Kislinger. In addition, Feynman appears as the advi-
sor in Ravndal’s personal listing in the MGP, presumably because Ravndal wanted it so.
[7] F Ravndal, “How I Got to Work with Feynman on the Covariant Quark Model” Int. J. Mod.
Phys. A30 (2015) 1530009, arXiv:1411.0509 [physics.hist-ph]

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[8] At the time of writing, the Caltech library lists the following additional students having Feynman
as either advisor or co-advisor.
Pochi Albert Yeh (1978) Stark-Induced Optical Nonlinearity ... (restricted)
George Siopsis (1987) Some Aspects of the Quantization of Theories ... Gauge Invariance (restricted)
However, I cannot judge how much influence Feynman had on the doctoral studies of either
Siopsis or Yeh, since both of their theses are not available to me. For this reason, I have not
listed them in the text. But of course, this is a subjective decision on my part.