A look inside Feynman’s calculus notebook | Hacker News Reader

A look inside Feynman’s calculus notebook

physicstoday.scitation.org

213 pointsgmays83 comments

The article would have been much more useful with a link to a PDF of a scan of the notebook.

Since the article is already 5 years old ("(2017)" missing from the title), I'm not the first one thinking this. A Web search led to this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/8smja9/is_there_a_... but nothing more, unfortunately.

Many papers are here and ridiculously seems nothing is scanned... Sounds like five Master Thesis on the historical Feynman could be extracted... :-)

"Guide to the Papers of Richard Phillips Feynman, 1933-1988" https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt5n39p6k0/admin/

A photocopy of what you are looking for can be found in Box 16, Folder 1...(pg 10 of the PDF) with the original at Niels Bohr Library: "Guide to the Papers of Richard Phillips Feynman, 1933-1988" - http://pdf.oac.cdlib.org/pdf/caltech/feynmanr.pdf

It seems quite a lot of work to be done on organizing all this.

"... The great mass of Feynman's working notes are scattered on miscellaneous sheets of papers, envelopes, placemats, and seemingly whatever else was at hand when thoughts struck him. Feynman occasionally took time to organize these into a system for files, although only a small fraction of his notes found their way into such a system. The great majority was left in a scattered condition and grouped during the processing of the papers as well as possible by subject matter. Many miscellaneous papers remain..."

Also looks like another goldmine are the Caltech Archives' Historical Files: https://collections.archives.caltech.edu/search?op%5B%5D=&q%...

> They aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process. I actually did the work on the paper.

-Richard Feynman

The name is not the person. The map is not the territory.

Also:

The Feynman Algorithm:

    1. Write down the problem.
    2. Think real hard.
    3. Write down the solution.

Implying that the "thinking" happens in the head, not on the paper.

There's a quote for everything, and its opposite, too. Sometimes from the same guy.

This was not Feynman's own description of himself, it was how his colleague Murray Gell-Mann described Feynman's process [0]. The way that appears to others may differ from how someone believes they are working themselves.

[0] http://wiki.c2.com/?FeynmanAlgorithm

"Murray Gell-Mann was reported to grumble that Feynman "spent a great deal of time and energy generating anecdotes about himself.""

It is funny that his quip has itself become part of the Feynman mystique.

Feynman said the first thing seriously in a superb in-depth interview with the historian Charles Weiner. The second is a facetious quote from someone else (Murray Gell-Mann, who seemed rather irritated with the question, as I recall).

As far as I can tell, most theoretical physicists: (a) can do a surprising amount in their head, especially when deeply familiar with a problem; and (b) have their ability greatly expanded when working on paper or with some other external aid (whiteboard etc).

Source: worked as a theoretical physicist for ~13 years. On a few occasions I solved publishable problems in my head, though usually after a lot of immersion in conversation and on paper first, just getting familiar with the problem, but (superficially) making little progress. More often, though, serious work involved a lot of exploration using external aids. I haven't done a poll of other theoretical physicists, but based on informal conversations wouldn't be surprised if many have a similar experience, with considerable variation.

Update: the Gell-Mann comment is here: https://www.nytimes.com/1992/09/20/magazine/part-showman-all... My interpretation is that he's being facetious, but with a grain of truth - a habit research students sometimes need to break is when they rely too much on methods as a crutch. Sometimes, no method will work, you just need to think really hard and try lots of things.

Thanks for the correction! I also think that both "in the head" and "on paper" work is necessary, of course, and I also think that Feynman did both, like everyone else. But we know that he often presented himself in the way the Gell-Mann quote describes him; he purposefully cultivated his image as a genius who can solve complicated problems in his head in seconds (if I recall correctly, he "pre-solved" problems, waited until the problems came up in a conversation and came up with the memorized solution after five seconds of "thinking").

Steve Girvin says that to solve a problem you need to know the answer before writing anything down.

Thanks for that link, the fuller Gell-Mann quote was good to note but that article by Gleick is so much more.

Gleick provides us with a vivid portrait of Feynman's character and his descriptions of what Feynman's contemporaries thought of him not only round out that portrait but also reveal parts of their characters. And he masterly weaves all that into the then - and still current - physics zeitgeist.

I'd not seen that article previously but I've Gleick's book Genius so much of it was familiar to me, but having not read it in years his NYT article was a wonderful short refresher.

Gleick's an excellent science writer, I'd highly recommended that those reading and or commenting here read the article.

Articles like these bother me because they're so conceptually similar to talking about a CEO's habit of waking up at five to take cold showers

Is it normal for individuals to index their (handwritten) notes? Atleast I've never seen anyone do that.

We now have <1s access to much larger indexes. Perhaps it's not as useful anymore?

I had schoolteachers that insisted on it. There’s also a popular note taking methodology called “bullet journaling” or “bujo” that took off sometime before Tumblr committed sudoku (so it spread around a bit there) that’s built entirely around distinguishable bullet points and indexing your notes–some more artistically than others.

Seppuku? Otherwise what is the alternate meaning of sudoku?

You have the meanings right. It’s an intentional internet-native joke. A meme.

It's a humorous intentional mistake that is popular in some parts of the internet.

Interestingly, It's becoming much more common for young people to use obscured phrases for advertiser-unfriendly but non-profane terms. For example, using un-aliving instead of commit suicide. It's not an ironic usage, but an actual usage to avoid getting agorithim'd on social media websites, but it leaks out into domains where advertiser unfriendliness isn't actually a problem (like HN for example) and gets used in the same way. It's a real time example of the intersection of marketing and technology shaping language and it's kind of fascinating.

I have personally heard "unalived" spoken aloud by teenagers on multiple occasions. One of the many positive effects tiktok has had on the United States.

Reminds me of a now-old Doctor Who story (Paradise Towers) where the girl k^Hgangs used "unalive" the same way (although usually they were murder victims)

Why would young people care if their tweet/tik is advertiser friendly? It seems like it would be the platforms, not the users, that encourage this behaviour?

They care because your content gets scrubbed without warning by the algorithm, and there is no way to appeal.

The problem is particularly acute on YouTube.

> The problem is particularly acute on YouTube.

And tiktok.

And Twitch which is also trigger happy with the TOS violations.

So the users don't care, but are forced to care by their platforms arbitrary rules?

If it were actual rules, it would be a lot simpler even if it were arbitrary. But usually it's AI blackbox decisions with very few humans you can ever talk to afterwards, even if the person in question makes a living from their account.

From what I gathered on HN, there are known but undocumented cases of FAANG employees extracting sexual or other favors for account unlocks or arbitrarily seizing accounts with noteworthy usernames.

Kids invented slang since long before Internet.

Being humorous about someone's suicide is kind of fucked up IMO

Edit am illiterate, finna an heroize

Welcome to the Internet.

As someone who barely survived attempted suicide 10 years ago, I completely disagree.

Your past doesn't qualify you more than other people to talk about suicide. We can play the "who's had more experience" game to prove my point but I'm just going to leave it at if someone made fun of my brother's suicide with "he committed sudoku (laughing crying emoji)" then I would be pretty sad. And that I misread OP anyway

I had no intention to portray myself as more qualified to talk about it. I should have made myself more clear, I'm sorry about that. I was offering my point of view on it. It's of course completely subjective, so your perspective is no less valid than mine. I should have been more explicit about that.

And the example you cited wouldn't be okay with me at all. I was thinking more about suicide related humour in general, I guess.

To me personally it's always been important to be open about it and to have some irony to get past the shame I had to work through.

I get why you feel that way, having lost your brother. Just last month my brother died at 39 from complication after a long life of drug addiction. If someone tried to joke about him I would probably lose it and just start shouting at them.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=commit%20sud...

https://www.slanglang.net/slang/commit-sudoku/

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/commit-sudoku

Also since I’m here, let me share one of my favorite tips since I don’t get to often: if you are on a Macintosh or iPhone you can highlight any word or multi-word phrase and do a “Look Up” action. Originally just for Dictionary words, this was updated at some point to do web searches too and is fantastic when you encounter unusual or new-to-you phrases.

It never occurred to me to check urban dictionary!

I did for a very long time. Learned it from a biologist. In my experience bench scientists tend to have better notebook discipline than people in other professions.

Whenever I start a new notebook I enthusiastically start on a new table of contents on the first page, and then forget about it...

I never did. My notes were not in chronological order anyway. I would just scribble on a random free page and my notes would be almost illegible even to me.

It didn't matter, it's the process of writing down itself that establishes them in the mind. At least it is for me.

It depends of why you are taking them. It's useless if you just want them to write minutes later or take them to help you stay focused like most people. But if you actually need them later like most researchers do, you will quickly pin for a way to sort through them easily and an index is pretty much as good as it gets.

That's how we were taught how to do it in school. We used to keep first 4-5 pages of every notebook blank to accommodate this. The first thing the teacher used to check was if the index was up to date. I guess it helped them too as assignments were easy to find. But then again latest home work was on the last page anyways .

Eventually some companies started producing notebooks with a printed index form. Those were more expensive and thus became status signals.

I think it is quite normal to add post-its to stick out of your notes for easy access. That is essentially an index.

For many decades I've done this with my work notes.

I use a cross-indexing scheme, using square brackets to mean "this uses information in item X" and angle brackets for "this is used by item Y". The latter is really important, because if I find an error in an early note, I can trace it's effect easily through later work.

My reference scheme is simple: X and Y are of the form B.P, where B is book number and P is page number in that book. I write these X and Y items in the margin, where they are easily visible, and later I copy them to the first page of the entry.

In addition to the above, I use keywords, and these go in the table of contents along with titles.

Every once in a while, I transcribe the table of contents and the cross-indexing information into a computer file, so that I can do logical operations on the data and find things I need.

None of this takes much effort, and it comes in handy when you're doing quite a lot of work at once.

There's a lengthy oral history, a series of interviews with him, on the American Institute of Physics website [1]. They're constantly talking about his notebooks and how he can go back to look things up in them.

[1] https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral... (link to fifth session)

What? Many notebooks have page numbers and a blank index for the owner to fill out as they go.

It's certainly 'normal' in academic and some professional circles. To the extent that the writing is the work, the indexing and other organizing methods suggested by a variety of note-taking "methodologies" is part of the work.

It also occurs to me that working before the age of ubiquitous computing devices readily at hand, the handwritten notes where the notes, not an adjunct to a notes app, online storage, and other assists for automatic indexing.

However, for the sort of person who still makes handwritten notes in their primary information-gathering step, going back and indexing them, even when the notes, or some abstracted form of them, will be entered into a computer.

I've tried it but can never keep up with it. The trouble is it requires particular notebooks to be on hand when you need them, or later "clean up" efforts to incorporate slapdash notes into your system.

However—I do it with digital notes! Thanks to the magic of full-text search, this amounts to just making sure to add enough relevant terms when creating a note that you'll be sure to find it later when you search for it. I find anything more involved too high-friction—I will end up neglecting it until it's useless. Even folders or categories or whatever are too much and will end up a mess. Search is the only thing that works for me.

I expect that if I worked off paper all the time, as most folks used to, it'd be easier to keep up with a paper indexing/TOC system. As it is, I almost never forget my phone, but have constantly forgotten various notebooks I've tried to keep. So, digital it is.

I'm surprised nobody has made a movie about him. What a fascinating character.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_(film)

It's on Amazon prime. Will watch it tonight! Thanks

Not to be confused by "The man who knew infinity" which is about Ramanujan, another great mathematician.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Knew_Infinity

And he's played by Matthew Broderick?! How is this not an 'HN nerd' type cult classic? At least, I've never heard of it either.

I watched it last night. It's about his romance with his first wife, and very little about adventures of a curious character. Having seen Feynman give a lecture in real life, and seeing him in various film clips, there is nothing about Broderick's performance that is like Feynman. For example, the enthusiasm and charisma Feynman displays when talking about physics was non-existent in the film.

A good TV movie (starring William Hurt and Brian Dennehy) is: "The Challenger Disaster" (2013) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2421662/

I re-watched this year with my kids (a few days after Hurt's death) and we all liked it.

I consider Feynman one of the all-time great men of history, alongside Richard Stallman and Jesus Christ, but this article doesn't really add much. His brilliance was realised later on in life, not as a teenager, young boy, toddler, baby or zygote. I think it's better to focus on his achievements then, not thence.

I don't believe greatness can come out of nowhere later in life. To borrow from Seneca, to demonstrate greatness, opportunity must meet pre-existing preparation. As such, I find the early lives of great people to be very interesting.

As another example, I highly recommend Nicola Tesla's "My Inventions"; he was unbelievably prepared for greatness

Feynman was a Putnam Fellow. Of course his mathematics education is noteworthy.

>I consider Feynman one of the all-time great men of history, alongside Richard Stallman and Jesus Christ.

I recognize my comment doesn't add much but this might be the funniest thing I've ever read on HN. Not even in a derisive way its just funny in a way that is hard to put into words.

Obviously OP is a comedic genius

Feynman was famously brilliant his whole life, like Lin-Manuel Miranda's version of Hamilton.

https://ia801603.us.archive.org/12/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.4...

For aspiring high school students to follow Feynman’s footsteps

(Above is a link to Thompson’s Calculus for the practical man, which Feynman mentions by name, although it’d probably be better to let the Internet Archive redirect the download wherever they want it to be from[1].)

[1] https://archive.org/download/in.ernet.dli.2015.462654/2015.4...

When I read about his obesssion with the series of math books "for the practical man" I went out and got my kids a copy. My daughter loved those books and carried them around wherever she went.

What strikes me here is the willingness of the father to equip Feynman with the right tools and admit to his shortcomings. The 'practical man' series also sounds interesting. Is there an modern version of these books? Or do the originals stand the test of time?

It's interesting that he used a plain notebook not a square ruled notbook. Mathematicians mostly use squared notebooks I guess.

Doesn't look too different to a Phyiscs students with an A.

Wonder what converts a good student to a Nobel Prize winner? A key insight.. a flash of brilliance from God.

It was his willingness to spend inordinate amounts of times working out answers to problems himself, instead of trusting the work of others. He explains in his autobiographies that this gave him a “different set of tools” than other people, which allowed him to tackle problems that others couldn’t or wouldn’t because they seemed insignificant.

He's also a human calculator with a natural aptitude for arithmetics that far outstrips most of his less distinguished peers. Most people forget that Feynman was really good at calculations and math. I think for famous physicists who were not talented mathematicians, Einstein (whom allegedly had all the math done by his wife Mileva Maric, he wasn't bad at math, just not exceptionally brilliant at it the way most of his contemporaries were) and Faraday were the exceptions, not the norm.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/may/22/science.research

Many of Einstein's contemporaries had some contribution to applied math

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solvay_conference_1927....

He wasn't born a "human calculator," he practiced at it.

People are born with predispositions. He practiced, but also had a gift.

Even if Donald Knuth spent double the time running than Usain Bolt, he could never even get close to 10 seconds.

If any Kardashian spent double the time studying maths than Donald Knuth, they would probably still not be able to solve a simple first degree differential equation.

Mileva did not do all his math for him, and if you know something I don’t, at the very least I think that needs a source.

Einstein’s reputation for being bad at math is an almost comical misconception, almost certainly due to his few known quotes about struggling with the mathematical toolbox he was using, but he was far and away more advanced in math than any of us mere mortals.

I agree that the sweeping statement "had all the math done by his wife Mileva Marić Einstein" is too much. Also, they got divorced at some point and Einstein didn't stop working then; although they were married in the miracle year.

A good reference is Appendix B, titled "The role of Mileva Einstein" in the excellent book "Who cares about Particle Physics?" by Pauline Gagnon (particle physicist at CERN/ATLAS). Here is a 4-page version, "The Forgotten Life of Mileva Marić Einstein" also by Pauline Gagnon:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.08888

I read the appendix by chance when I read the book itself, and I have to say it's fascinating. The book is about particle physics at CERN in general, and there's a late chapter about diversity at CERN, to which this is an appendix. The whole book is great, I read it as a refresher, as I left the field of (particle) physics many years ago. Based on the evidence presented, it is possible that some (how much?) of Einstein's most famous work was a collaboration between Maric and Einstein, and they simply didn't include her in the credits, because it was easier to get published as a single male author (and they needed the money).