Richard Feynman joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology in 1950. The move followed his five years as a professor of theoretical physics at Cornell University, where he developed major ideas in quantum electrodynamics after World War II.
Caltech became Feynman’s academic home for the rest of his career. He later held the Richard Chace Tolman Professorship and became one of the institute’s most influential teachers. His Caltech lectures from the early 1960s were edited into The Feynman Lectures on Physics, a widely used introduction to the subject.
A common mix-up is confusing Feynman’s arrival at Caltech with later milestones there. He began the Caltech appointment in 1950, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, and helped investigate the Challenger disaster in 1986. The 1950 date therefore marks the start of his long Caltech career, not the year of his Nobel recognition or his best-known teaching project.