Van go: delivering Feynman's vision to the people.

In the late 1980s, when Michelle Feynman would drive up in a big brown-and-tan van covered with odd-looking symbols, the other students at her Pasadena, Calif., art college would gape. Those trying to decipher the symbols didn't know that she was the daughter of the quantum physicist Richard P. Feynman, who had created the figures. The license plate reading "QANTUM" didn't clue the students in either.

Most onlookers reckoned that the pictures decorating the 1975 Dodge Tradesman Maxivan were some sort of Native American designs, Michelle Feynman recalls, not the innovative depictions of subatomic particles that had helped her father win a share of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics. "People had no idea what to make of them," she says.

The display on the van, now garaged in Torrance, Calif., was the beginning of a spotty but still-growing public awareness of Feynman diagrams, which first appeared in abstruse physics journals decades earlier.

On May 11, 1998, Feynman diagrams were briefly in the public eye when a post office in Lake Worth, Fla., used one of them as its stamp cancellation to honor Richard Feynman, who had died in February of that year, on what would have been his 80th birthday.

Last May, Feynman diagrams appeared on one of four U.S. postage stamps honoring American scientists. Graphic artist Victor Stabin of Jim Thorpe, Pa., who designed the stamps, says that the diagrams lend intrigue. "They don't look like any other symbols you've ever seen," he says.

Michelle Feynman says that she'd like the images on the stamps to have the same effect on people today that the figures on the van did--and then some. "I hope young people will be curious about the faces and the squiggles and become inspired to explore science," she says.--P.W.

DODGING PHYSICS -- Feynman had some of his diagrams painted onto a 1975 Dodge Maxivan, shown here in Mexico in 1978. Feynman (center) poses between his wife Gweneth and his daughter Michelle.