RARE MANUSCRIPT LEAF OF CALCULATIONS, WRITTEN ENTIRELY IN NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING PHYSICIST RICHARD FEYNMAN'S HAND

FEYNMAN, Richard P. Manuscript leaf. No place, no date. Single unlined sheet of onionskin paper, measuring 8-1/2 by 10-3/4 inches; p. 1. Floated and framed with a portrait, entire piece measures 22-1/2 by 18-1/2 inches. $12,500.

Fascinating and rare manuscript leaf of mathematical calculations, very likely lecture notes for a graduate course that Feynman taught on the mathematical methods of physics at Caltech during the early 1970s, written on the recto entirely in Richard Feynman's hand.

Richard Feynman was an "American theoretical physicist who was widely regarded as the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in his field in the post-World War II era. Feynman remade quantum electrodynamics—the theory of the interaction between light and matter—and thus altered the way science understands the nature of waves and particles. He was co-awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965 for this work, which tied together in an experimentally perfect package all the varied phenomena at work in light, radio, electricity, and magnetism. The other cowinners of the Nobel Prize, Julian S. Schwinger of the United States and Tomonaga Shin'ichiro of Japan, had independently created equivalent theories, but it was Feynman's that proved the most original and far-reaching. The problem-solving tools that he invented—including pictorial representations of particle interactions known as Feynman diagrams—permeated many areas of theoretical physics in the second half of the 20th century" (Britannica). In one of Feynman's famous lectures, he remarked: "To summarize, I would use the words of Jeans, who said that 'the Great Architect seems to be a mathematician.' To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature. C.P. Snow talked about two cultures. I really think that those two cultures separate people who have and people who have not had this experience of understanding mathematics well enough to appreciate nature once."

About-fine condition, with only mildest edge toning and rough top edge from notebook removal.