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Book finished
Oct. 31st, 2013 10:43 amGenius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
I've read several biographies and memoirs of Feynman. IMO this is the best I've read yet. It falls under criticism from some people that it gets too far into the technical nitty-gritty of his work, but it won't surprise people who know me that it just makes the book that much better for me. I really liked that the author spent a fair amount of time talking about his contemporaries in science and the relationships and rivalries that were going on between them. There was a richness in this book in that regard that I hadn't found elsewhere.
I was particularly impressed with the tales of mental prowess of a type that I don't think that we really see anymore in this age of ubiquitous computers. The stories of lunch table mathematical contests remind me of times when I've seen musicians challenging one another to do things like snap transpose difficult pieces by just being told in the middle of playing, "NOW G SHARP!." The people in this story (especially Feynman) learned a bag of mathematical tricks that are simply not that helpful these days.
I thought this book was going to take another week or so but it turned out that the last 40% of it was footnotes, indexes and credits.
I'm falling behind on audiobooks because of several great podcasts I'm now listening to; Science Friday, This is Only a Test, Naked Scientists, Startalk, BBC World Update Daily Commute, Car Talk, The Amp Hour. I haven't started my next audiobook yet and probably won't for at least a week, I'm about 1/3 of the way through the 24 hour Octoberkast event.
★★★★★
I've read several biographies and memoirs of Feynman. IMO this is the best I've read yet. It falls under criticism from some people that it gets too far into the technical nitty-gritty of his work, but it won't surprise people who know me that it just makes the book that much better for me. I really liked that the author spent a fair amount of time talking about his contemporaries in science and the relationships and rivalries that were going on between them. There was a richness in this book in that regard that I hadn't found elsewhere.
I was particularly impressed with the tales of mental prowess of a type that I don't think that we really see anymore in this age of ubiquitous computers. The stories of lunch table mathematical contests remind me of times when I've seen musicians challenging one another to do things like snap transpose difficult pieces by just being told in the middle of playing, "NOW G SHARP!." The people in this story (especially Feynman) learned a bag of mathematical tricks that are simply not that helpful these days.
I thought this book was going to take another week or so but it turned out that the last 40% of it was footnotes, indexes and credits.
I'm falling behind on audiobooks because of several great podcasts I'm now listening to; Science Friday, This is Only a Test, Naked Scientists, Startalk, BBC World Update Daily Commute, Car Talk, The Amp Hour. I haven't started my next audiobook yet and probably won't for at least a week, I'm about 1/3 of the way through the 24 hour Octoberkast event.
★★★★★
