José Teixeira
Most scientists are known for being people who solved mysteries that had been stumping lesser smarty-pants for centuries. Some of them even answered questions nobody had ever thought to ask before (I'm looking at you, Einstein). But a lot of great minds haven't really been great explainers. Richard Feynman, the American physicist most famous for pioneering the field of Quantum Electrodynamics - while playing bongos at a strip club - somehow was both. Feynman could take the most absurd-sounding, mindbending concept in the Universe and break it down to you like you wouldn't believe.
He was also one of the greatest scientists of all time, having won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for explaining to other physicists how light and matter interact. He invented Feynman Diagrams in the 1940s and made substantial contributions to the fields of Quantum Computing, Particle Physics, and Nanotechnology.
But it's really his persona that makes him one of my idols. He was a total character who liked the ladies, math, and playing bongos; and he didn't really care what other people thought of him. In fact, his reaction to being told over the phone that he had just won the Nobel Prize was "Can I go back to sleep?".
Most importantly, though, Richard Feynman believed, as do I, that understanding how the World works is essential to being a person, not just a scientist, which made him not only one of History's greatest scientists, but also one of the greatest teachers.
His talents were so apparent that, even before he got his Ph.D., he was offered a job to work on the Manhattan Project - the US Government program to develop the first atomic bomb. But even as a junior physicist Feynman didn't care who he crossed. If he didn't agree with Niels Bohr, he'd tell him. He blatantly refused to wear safety goggles to the first test explosion of the atomic bomb. If he got bored, he'd go around Los Alamos - the super-duper-secret lab in New Mexico where the Manhattan Project was located - causing mayhem, picking locks on drawers, sneaking into the lab after-hours, pranking other physicists by leaving notes that made them think their research had been stolen by spies... You know, funny stuff - that only got him arrested occasionally. So he was kind of annoying, but that's what made him a great scientist. He was persistent, and endlessly curious, and didn't really care whether or not he was wrong. He just wanted to find the solution to a problem. If more people were like him, the world would be a much better place, for sure.
Aside from being a great scientist and a great teacher, Richard Feynman was just a playful and curious guy. He reportedly did a lot of math in strip clubs; he was an awesome bongo player and a painter; and he spent years negotiating with the Soviet Government trying to get into Tuva, a remote country in Asia where he wanted to learn the native style of throat-singing. Sadly, a letter clearing him to travel to Tuva arrived the day after he died.
One of his most famous works, "The Feynman Lectures on Physics", was a series of lectures he gave to freshmen at Caltech in 1963 that was later turned into books. Even today, these books are used in introductory Physics courses for being such a masterpiece.
So, I wish Richard Feynman was still around because he was awesome and I want to meet him and be his best friend. But after two battles of cancer, he died in 1988.
His last words were "I'd hate to die twice, it is so boring".
