Richard Feynman’s First Lecture (1940)

“I went through fire on my first.”

Feynman on the day of his Graduation from Princeton University (1942)

While still a graduate student at Princeton University in 1940, Richard P. Feynman (1918–1988) gave his first lecture in a seminar on electrodynamics, the topic that would eventually earn him the 1965 Nobel Prize in physics. In front of a prestigious audience consisting of Nobel laureates Albert Einstein (1879–1955), Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958), and Eugene Wigner (1902–1995) as well as the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann (1903–1957), Feynman lectured on the current state of what is now known as the Wheeler- Feynman absorber theory.