Abstract

Introduced by Richard Feynman in the 1950s, path integrals have become part of the standard dialect in the physics community. Nevertheless, this powerful tool has raised much doubt and disbelief in the mathematics community. In this short talk, I will explain the intuitive idea behind path integral in a way that will be comprehensible to second and third year undergraduates. The first ten minutes of the talk should be accessible to people who understand the basics of quantum and classical mechanics. (IA variational principles and IB quantum mechanics would suffice). A knowledge of the heat equation would also be helpful. The last five minutes of the talk would be more suitable for people who have a background in analysis/probability.