Richard P Frogman, lecturer-scientist-frog

Satirical caricature of Richard P Feynman as a contemplative frog professor

Richard P Feynman Frogman

For my milestone birthday in 2025, my artist daughter made this humorous illustration combining my favorite modern scientist, Richard P Feynman, and my favorite animal, the frog. If you study the illustration, you might find a tadpole Frogman Diagram, a lily-pad autobiography, a Nobel prize, and fly.

I like Richard Feynman because of his amusing storytelling in his two autobiographies, Surely Your'e Joking, Mr. Feynman and What Do You Care What Other People Think?, in which he shows his love of jokes and pranks, and his disdain for social conventions and authority figures. His favorite kind of joke was to say something that is true but is not believed, for example, the story "Who stole the door?" in Surely You're Joking.

Another example: When he got a phone call waking him in the middle of the night informing him that he won the Nobel prize, he complained and angrily hung up. When asked by his wife who it was, he said with disgust "I won the Nobel prize" and of course was not believed. The house where this happened was in Altadena, which burned down in the 2025 Eaton fire.

Feynman was of course an accomplished physicist, having developed quantum electrodynamics, the Feynman Diagram, and the physics of superfluid liquid helium. As a freshman physics major, I read his textbook The Feynman Lectures on Physics. A co-author of the textbook was my physics professor, Matt Sands.

I like frogs because they live extraordinary lives, starting out basically as fish, hatching from jelly-like eggs into swimming creatures breathing with gills; they then metamorphize into land animals with hands, feet, and powerful legs.

I once lived next to an urban swamp that was home to many tree frogs. I could hear them croaking in chorus at night from my bedroom. The eggs and tadpoles made fascinating pets. I would gather them from the swamp and put them in a large jar, and watch them hatch, grow, and change.

pet tadpole in large jar 1980s

I discovered that they leave the water even when they still have big tails and their legs are just stubs. Once I found one in the kitchen sink. At that point, I would release them back into the swamp.

This population of tree frogs supported an abundance of my second-favorite animal, the garter snake. They had beautiful green and brown stripes and could be found in my yard. The babies were pencil-thin.



Richard Frogman artwork ©2025 Tamara Chang
Web page ©2025 Gray Chang