Feynman's imposter syndrome was actually justified, he couldn't really work at the same level of impact as most of the other Nobel laureates. His Nobel prize wo

Feynman's imposter syndrome was actually justified, he couldn't really work at the same level of impact as most of the other Nobel laureates. His Nobel prize work was largely an extension of Dirac's previous work on path integrals, the bulk of the work that showed it to be equivalent to the traditional operator expansion method developed by Schwinger was done by Dyson, which is what really was the crucial piece. In fact, Feynman couldn't even solve the path integral for the hydrogen atom, that was done by Kleinert. In one of his books, he recounted an anecdote of Schwinger who, having made a mistake in a Bessel function, spent a few minutes to derive the solution from scratch to refresh his memory. It's basically for this reason that he "retired" from theoretical physics relatively shortly after his Nobel prize, he just couldn't keep up with the rest of the research being done.