Why is it interesting?

Feynman’s diagrams and rules were a sort of bookkeeping-by-picture process that miraculously captured all the details of the standard model in a series of diagrams; they allowed people less talented than Feynman to perform the most complex calculations carefully and correctly. Many of the great advances in physics are like this; they codify and make routine what was formerly almost impossible to think about.Whenever I have a new problem to work on—in physics or options theory—the first major struggle is to gain some intuition about how to proceed; the second struggle is to transform this intuition into something more formulaic, a set of rules anyone can follow, rules that no longer require the original insight itself. In this way, one person’s breakthrough becomes everybody’s possession.

From My Life As A Quant by Emanuel Derman

Layman

Student

• David Griffith: Elementary Particles contains an absolutely painless introduction to Feynman diagrams.
• For another nice introduction see chapter 6 in An Invitation to Quantum Field Theory by Luis Álvarez-Gaumé
• R.D. Mattuck: A Guide to Feynman Diagrams in the Many-body Problem

Researcher

Common Question 1

Common Question 2

Examples

Example1

Example2:

History