Feynman diagram
Feynman diagrams are named after Richard Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics. His diagrams are very simple in the case of quantum electrodynamics (QED), where there are only two kinds of particles: electrons (little particles inside atoms) and photons (particles of light). In QED, the only thing that can happen is that an electron (or its antiparticle) can emit (or absorb) a photon, so there is only one building block for any collision. The probability amplitude for the emission is very simple—it has no real part, and the imaginary part is the charge of the electron.