1 memorable life: Freeman Dyson, 1923–2020

• In 1949, Dyson tackled one of the trickiest problems in the field: how to describe the behavior of electrons and photons.
• Dyson's insight, which came to him while riding a Greyhound bus through Nebraska, proved key to quantum electrodynamics, which the physicist Richard Feynman called the "jewel of physics."

Dyson never won a Nobel Prize for his work. He never even bothered to earn a Ph.D.

• Instead, he spent the rest of his career pursuing whatever caught his interest, migrating from atomic reactor design to nuclear bomb-powered space exploration to the mathematics of baseball.
• He achieved popular renown as a gifted scientific writer, publishing his final book in 2018 at the age of 95.
• A dedicated contrarian, later in his career he came under fire for doubting the danger of human-made climate change.

The bottom line: Few scientists can be said to have played as important a role in the making of our present than Dyson — and even fewer could so brilliantly envision the future.