Feynman
I am currently reading “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” by Richard Feynman. In case you aren’t familiar with this guy, he was one of the world’s most brilliant physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project, won the Nobel Prize for physics, traded ideas with Einstein and Bohr, and had a great sense of humor and child-like curiosity for all manner of mechanical things. The book is fantastic, and I thank Witold for giving it to me for my birthday. This guy is such a fascinating character that it is almost hard to believe. I really relate to him because of the way he approaches all the problems put before him. He uses common sense and logic to get through the stickiest situations and most daunting academic tasks. I like to think that I do the same thing most of the time. He really did believe that these academics who memorized all these formulas and statistics were doing themselves a disservice because all that stuff can be looked up in a matter of minutes. He never bogged himself down in those sorts of details. Instead, he always concerned himself with why stuff worked the way it worked, so he could see answers, or at least the approximations of answers, before he actually did any math. Now, because his writing style is so common and familiar, it is easily forgotten that he could get away with and do things the way he did, because he was smart enough to not only do the math, but invent new ways of doing the math. That is the big difference between me and him. We both have common sense, but he is a million times smarter, and good at math. And he was Jewish.
Feynman was a jewel.
Beware, he tended to embellish his stories; but don’t we all?