The Doctoral Students of Richard Feynman

I document 32 students who graduated to receive PhDs under Feynman's supervision. I provide links to their doctoral dissertations.


Introduction
An ordinary genius is an ordinary fellow ... There is no mystery as to how his mind works. ... It is different with the magicians ... Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students ... Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber.
-Mark Kac [1] Since this is the centennial year of Richard Feynman's birth, I attempt here to dispel a minor myth about him. The myth is embodied in the words of Mark Kac that I have emphasized above, and in the following statement attributed to one of Feynman's students, Philip Platzman [2]: "The reason why Feynman did not have many students was because he was very difficult with them, because he didn't really worry about students. ... He had a few students, but not many." Thus a prevailing belief in the scientific community seems to be [3] Feynman had very few doctoral students who completed theses under his supervision. It may be surprising to most people to learn this is not true.
The number of Feynman's doctoral students is actually 35 ± 3, with the uncertainty intended to take into account some unavailable documents as well as possible subjectivity on my part [4]. The lineup of students who completed their PhD research under Feynman's discerning gaze began in 1951 with Michel Baranger, Laurie Brown, and Giovanni Lomanitz at Cornell, and continued until at least 1977 with Ted Barnes and Thomas Curtright at Caltech.
While 35 is not an extremely large number of doctoral students to have mentored during a lifetime as an academic (e.g. compared to the 70+ dissertations supervised by Julian Schwinger during five decades), nonetheless, 35 does amount on average to almost one PhD for every year of Feynman's time as a professor. Moreover, were it not for illness during the last several years of his career, Feynman might have supervised several more students.
Among Feynman's doctoral students the most recognized physicist is undoubtedly George Zweig, who was also mentored by Murray Gell-Mann and Alvin Tollestrup, and who graduated from Caltech in 1964. Soon thereafter Zweig had a major impact on elementary particle physics through his independent invention of the "quark model" of hadrons. However, in my opinion, the research of Feynman's other students has also had significant impact and continues to influence several areas of physics. All of these were Caltech students. Originally I included Platzman in this second list. But upon looking at other documents I became convinced that his thesis was effectively co-supervised by Feynman to the extent that he belonged in the first list. (Indeed, as I document later, Platzman's personal listing in the Mathematics Genealogy Project states that Feynman was a co-advisor.) Similar remarks apply for Robert Carlitz [5] and Finn Ravndal [6]. If so, that would justify my head count of 35 "Feynman PhDs" to be a lower bound.
Finally, I find several less compelling cases where Feynman was only a member of the dissertation examination committee at Caltech and was not particularly influential for the research, so far as I can tell. I suspect there are many more such cases that I have not found, since on this point documentation is quite often incomplete and all committee members are not listed. For the last two cases given above, I cannot access the theses to see if Feynman was acknowledged for significant influence.

Sources
At the time of this writing, wikipedia lists only six students to have officially received PhDs with Feynman as the advisor, in alphabetical order: James M. Bardeen, Laurie Brown, Thomas Curtright, Al Hibbs, Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, and George Zweig. However, this list is obviously far from complete, as documented by the Math Genealogy Project (MGP) and by the Caltech library archives.
According to the MGP, also at the time of this writing, there were at least thirteen other doctoral degrees completed under Feynman's supervision in addition to those listed in wikipedia. In particular, Philip Platzman is in the MGP list but not in wikipedia. I suppose that is because he requested MGP to classify him as a doctoral student of Feynman. Platzman's personal listing in MGP supports my supposition. By way of comparison, and as a measure of the completeness of their database, Schwinger has only 21 of his students listed by the MGP.
In any case, the mother lode of information about Feynman's doctoral students can be found at the Caltech library. A direct search of their online database produces a list of 31 PhD theses where Feynman is described as the advisor or co-advisor, at the time of this writing [8]. By way of comparison, a direct search for Gell-Mann as advisor turns up 18 theses in the Caltech library database. Among these, Hilton and Levine are shown to be co-advised by Feynman and Gell-Mann. Remarkably, Zweig is not listed as a Gell-Mann advisee.
Beyond these publicly accessible sources, the largest amount of documentation that is available to me concerns Thomas Curtright, who has provided this succinctly amusing excerpt from his thesis examination committee papers [3]:

Summary
From looking at many theses and papers by Caltech students, my overall impression is simply this: Feynman played a major role through his mentoring and supervision of doctoral students. He exerted tremendous influence on graduate student research conducted at Caltech during his four decades there -perhaps even more than his widely perceived influence on Caltech undergraduate studies. I conclude that it is not true Richard Feynman "had a few students, but not many."