5 ms·

> 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 ans

> 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.

acqq 10y ago
An older legendary story with the same premise: "Wren, Hooke, and Halley had discussed the problem at a coffee house following a meeting of the Royal Society in January of 1684, and Wren had offered a cash prize to whoever could provide a derivation of the shape of planetary orbits under the assumption of an inverse-square central force of attraction toward the (presumed stationary) sun. Hooke had claimed to have a proof that the paths were ellipses, but never provided it. Against this background, Halley paid a visit to Newton, who later told Abraham De Moivre about the fateful meeting. According to De Moivre: In 1684 Dr Halley came to visit him at Cambridge. After they had been some time together, the Dr asked him what he thought the curve would be that would be described by the planets supposing the force of attraction towards the sun to be reciprocal to the square of their distance from it. Sir Isaac replied immediately that it would be an ellipse. The Doctor, struck with joy and amazement, asked him how he knew it. Why, saith he, I have calculated it. Whereupon Dr Halley asked him for his calculation without any farther delay. Sir Isaac looked among his papers but could not find it, but he promised him to renew it and then to send it him…" http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath658/kmath658.htm http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath658/kmath658.htm
- bboreham 10y ago
  And to complete the circle... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman%27s_Lost_Lecture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman%27s_Lost_Lecture
mrestko 10y ago
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.
- fossuser 10y ago
  I just finished "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman!" this morning and it was in that one.
- lloeki 10y ago
  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.
studentrob 10y ago
I think of that as a good communication style. The more concise you can be, the more likely you are to hold someone's attention.

acqq 10y ago

An older legendary story with the same premise: "Wren, Hooke, and Halley had discussed the problem at a coffee house following a meeting of the Royal Society in January of 1684, and Wren had offered a cash prize to whoever could provide a derivation of the shape of planetary orbits under the assumption of an inverse-square central force of attraction toward the (presumed stationary) sun. Hooke had claimed to have a proof that the paths were ellipses, but never provided it. Against this background, Halley paid a visit to Newton, who later told Abraham De Moivre about the fateful meeting. According to De Moivre: In 1684 Dr Halley came to visit him at Cambridge. After they had been some time together, the Dr asked him what he thought the curve would be that would be described by the planets supposing the force of attraction towards the sun to be reciprocal to the square of their distance from it. Sir Isaac replied immediately that it would be an ellipse. The Doctor, struck with joy and amazement, asked him how he knew it. Why, saith he, I have calculated it. Whereupon Dr Halley asked him for his calculation without any farther delay. Sir Isaac looked among his papers but could not find it, but he promised him to renew it and then to send it him…" http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath658/kmath658.htm http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath658/kmath658.htm

bboreham 10y ago
And to complete the circle... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman%27s_Lost_Lecture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman%27s_Lost_Lecture

mrestko 10y ago

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.

fossuser 10y ago
I just finished "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman!" this morning and it was in that one.
lloeki 10y ago
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.

studentrob 10y ago

I think of that as a good communication style. The more concise you can be, the more likely you are to hold someone's attention.