Francis Lee Friedman (September 5, 1918 – August 4, 1962) was a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
After working as an assistant physicist at the National Bureau of Standards he joined the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago (a division of the Manhattan Project) in 1942, first as an assistant to Gregory Breit, where he helped in estimating the thickness of the concrete shield surrounding a high-power nuclear reactor.
[3] During the 1955–1956 academic year, Friedman worked in the Niels Bohr Laboratory at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen.
Friedman was the principal author of the first edition of the PSSC Physics textbook (1960).
Burton Richter, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, was one of his students.