Joan Feynman
American astrophysicist (1927–2020)
Joan Feynman (March 31, 1927 – July 21, 2020) was an American astrophysicist and space physicist. She made contributions to the study of solar wind particles and fields, sun-Earth relations, and magnetospheric physics. She was known for creating a model that predicts the number of high-energy particles likely to hit a spacecraft over its lifetime, and for uncovering a method for predicting sunspot cycles. She was particularly known for illuminating the origin of auroras.
Early life
Feynman was raised in the Far Rockaway section of Queens, New York City, along with her elder brother, Richard Feynman (who became a Nobel Prize-winning physicist). Her parents were Lucille Feynman (née Phillips), a homemaker, and Melville Arthur Feynman, a businessman. Her parents, both Ashkenazi Jews, originated from Minsk, Belarus (then in Russian Empire) and Poland.
Joan was an inquisitive child, and she exhibited an interest in understanding the natural world from an early age. However, her mother told her, "Women's brains can't do science." Despite this, her brother Richard always encouraged her to be curious about the universe. "Richard was my first teacher", she recalled.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joan Feynman” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.