
My Time with Richard Feynman (2005) - jonbaer
https://backchannel.com/my-time-with-richard-feynman-8e15ef968e75#.4xv7d04of
======
iamcreasy
> I always found it incredible. He would start with some problem, and fill up
> pages with calculations. And at the end of it, he would actually get the
> right answer! But he usually wasn’t satisfied with that. Once he’d gotten
> the answer, he’d go back and try to figure out why it was obvious. And often
> he’d come up with one of those classic Feynman straightforward-sounding
> explanations. And he’d never tell people about all the calculations behind
> it. Sometimes it was kind of a game for him: having people be flabbergasted
> by his seemingly instant physical intuition, not knowing that really it was
> based on some long, hard calculation he’d done.

This part is particularly enlightening.

~~~
mrestko
He does write about this in one of his books (although I've forgotten which
one). He tells a story about arguing with a colleague and coming to the
conclusion that "trivial" in the context of mathematics is often used to
simply mean "it is proven" not that it is necessarily trivial to arrive that
the solution.

~~~
lloeki
One of my later math teachers used to joke that there were three difficulty
levels for proofs in mathematics: trivial, easy, and comfy. In hindsight I
believe he was right: even the toughest proofs require more of you to be
comfortable with some relevant concepts than anything else.

------
crux
Remarkable how Wolfram can turn any occasion to a celebration of his own
achievements and preoccupations.

~~~
bpchaps
Maybe he's getting better, though! ;) Compared to his similar articles about
Ramanujan and Minsky:

    
    
      sed 's/[^a-zA-Z]/ /' ramanujan.txt | tr ' ' '\n' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | egrep "^(mine|his|me|i|him|he)$"| sort | uniq -c | sort -n 
         11 me
         15 him
         82 i
        107 his
        148 he
    
      sed 's/[^a-zA-Z]/ /' minsky.txt | tr ' ' '\n' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | egrep "^(mine|his|me|i|him|he)$"| sort | uniq -c | sort -n 
          4 him
         11 me
         22 his
         45 he
         51 i
    
      sed 's/[^a-zA-Z]/ /' feynman.txt| tr ' ' '\n' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | egrep "^(mine|his|me|i|him|he)$"| sort | uniq -c | sort -n 
          4 him
          8 me
         17 his
         45 i
         55 he

------
ColinWright
Previously on HN ...

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12071186](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12071186)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12070892](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12070892)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=724322](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=724322)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=80937](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=80937)

~~~
patrickmn
One of your examples was eight and a half years ago with one upvote... calm
down :)

~~~
ColinWright
Indeed, but one was three hours ago, and another was only 2 hours ago.

~~~
dexwiz
Looks like Back Channel recently moved to medium, and this is on the front
page of it. That explains the reposts.

~~~
bhaumik
The opposite actually. Steven Levy joined the Medium and started Backchannel.
Recently, the publication was acquired by Conde Nast.

[http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/16/11952876/steven-levy-
wired...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/16/11952876/steven-levy-wired-
backchannel-conde-nast-acquired)

------
studentrob
> Like when we were both consulting for Thinking Machines in Boston, I would
> always be jumping up and down about how if the management of the company
> didn’t do this or that, they would fail. He would just say, “Why don’t you
> let these people run their company; we can’t figure out this kind of stuff.”
> Sadly, the company did in the end fail. But that’s another story.

Thinking Machines failed, though it did turn into some other cool stuff,
including a company called Ab Initio. Their data warehousing software formed
the basis for my first job as a consultant out of college.

It also made me want to study machine learning. Little did I know the creators
of Ab Initio had previously been part of a significant stab at AI via Thinking
Machines Corporation.

