From which university did Feynman earn his PhD?

From which university did Feynman earn his PhD? Princeton University. Richard Feynman received his doctorate from Princeton in 1942 after completing graduate research in theoretical physics.

Feynman had already earned his undergraduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1939. At Princeton, he achieved an exceptionally high score on the physics entrance examination and joined a department that included prominent figures in theoretical physics. His doctoral advisor was John Archibald Wheeler.

His dissertation, titled “The Principle of Least Action in Quantum Mechanics,” applied the classical idea of stationary action to quantum theory. The work developed ideas that later became central to Feynman’s path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics, in which a quantum system is described through contributions from many possible histories.

Princeton was therefore not merely the institution that awarded Feynman his PhD; it was where he made the conceptual breakthrough that shaped much of his later career. He subsequently worked at Cornell University and the California Institute of Technology, where he spent most of his academic life.