What was the name of Richard Feynman's adopted daughter?

The story behind the answer

What was the name of Richard Feynman's adopted daughter? Her name was Michelle.

Michelle was adopted by Richard Feynman and his third wife, Gweneth Howarth, in 1968. The couple had married in Pasadena in 1960 after meeting near Lake Geneva, and they already had a son, Carl, born in 1962.

Gweneth, who came from Ripponden in West Yorkshire, became Feynman's lifelong partner. Their family life included homes in Altadena, California, and Baja California. The Baja beach house was purchased using money from Feynman's 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Michelle is sometimes confused with Gweneth, because Gweneth was Feynman's wife and the other parent in the adoption. She is also associated with Feynman's literary legacy: Michelle edited Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track, a collection of his letters published in 2005. That role helped introduce more of Feynman's personal writing to later readers.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Sept. 2026

Add question to a list

Choose a list to keep this question in: