Richard Feynman attends a Caltech graduation ceremony. Credit: Courtesy of the Archives, California Institute of Technology.

“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, Enigmas of Chance

As the centennial of Richard Feynman’s birth approaches, it’s a good time to dispel a minor myth about him: that he had very few doctoral students. The myth is embodied in the words of Mark Kac above and in a statement attributed to one of his students, Philip Platzman: “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.” Despite such statements, which seem to represent the prevailing belief in the scientific community, the claim that Feynman did not often supervise students for their PhD theses is simply not true.

The number of Feynman’s doctoral students is actually about 30, with some uncertainty due to unavailable documents as well as possible subjectivity on my part. The lineup of students who completed their PhD research under Feynman’s discerning gaze begins with Michel Baranger, Laurie Brown, and Giovanni Lomanitz at Cornell University in 1951 and concludes with Ted Barnes and Thomas Curtright at Caltech in 1977.

Although 30 is not an extremely large number of doctoral students to have mentored during a lifetime as an academic (Julian Schwinger, for example, supervised at least 70 during five decades), it does amount to three PhDs for every four years of Feynman’s time as a professor. If not for illness during the last several years of his career, Feynman might have supervised several more students.

The most recognized physicist among Feynman’s doctoral students is undoubtedly George Zweig, who graduated from Caltech in 1964. Soon thereafter Zweig had a major impact on elementary-particle physics through his independent invention of the quark model of hadrons. The research of Feynman’s other students has also had significant impact and continues to influence several areas of physics.

At the time of this writing, Wikipedia lists only six students to have officially received PhDs with Feynman as the adviser. The mother lode of information about Feynman’s doctoral students can be found at the Caltech library. A direct search of the school’s online database produces a list of 25 PhD theses in which Feynman is described as the adviser or co-adviser. By way of comparison, a direct search for his Caltech colleague Murray Gell-Mann as adviser turns up 16 theses. Zweig, along with Henry Hilton and Michael Levine, were co-advised by Feynman and Gell-Mann. Beyond publicly accessible sources, the largest amount of documentation on Feynman’s doctoral students came from Curtright.

From looking at many theses and papers by Caltech students, my overall impression is that Feynman played a major role in the school’s graduate program in physics 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.

The Students

“There are PhDs, and then there are Feynman PhDs.”

—Richard Sherman

From theses and PhD dissertation examination documents in which it was either explicitly stated or otherwise clear that Feynman was the adviser or co-adviser, I find the 30 doctoral students listed here, the first three at Cornell, the others at Caltech:

From documents in which Feynman was not described as an adviser or co-adviser but was a member of the PhD examination committee (although not the committee chairman) and/or was acknowledged in the thesis for moderate influence and general advice, I find in addition:

I also find several less compelling cases where Feynman was only a member of the dissertation examination committee at Caltech and was not particularly influential in the research, as 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 not all committee members are listed. For example:

Richard Lipes (1969) “I. Application of multi-Regge theory to production processes. II. High energy model for proton-proton scattering”

Christopher Hill (1977) “Higgs scalars and the nonleptonic weak interactions”

William Dally (1986) “A VLSI architecture for concurrent data structures”

John Wawrzynek (1987) “VLSI concurrent computation for music synthesis”

T. S. Van Kortryk is an amateur mathematician based in Paris, Missouri, who has an interest in the history of physics.

Editor’s note, 30 August: Due to a change in the thesis information provided by Caltech and further research, the author has determined that Feynman did not serve as co-adviser for Sandip Trivedi’s 1990 thesis. Two references to that thesis were removed from the article, and the minimum number of Feynman doctoral students was revised from 31 to 30.