I don't remember how I came across this book; maybe because Feynman is widely recognized as a great teacher and speaker, someone with an honest — earnest even! — appreciation for physics, mathematics, the sciences in general.

He was generally very curious, and after having read this sort of memoir — it's all, after all, "based on recorded audio conversations that Feynman had with his close friend and drumming partner Ralph Leighton" — I suppose I became a bit more mindful about the power of curiosity, relentless tinkering, being unafraid of failure, etc. which are generaly traits of highly successful people, anyway.

(not that I'd necessarily want to be one, mind you)

I have a few quotes on this book that I have yet to retrieve, but they're mostly funny anecdotes of his wicked sense of humor, or examples of his rash assertiveness. He frequently toed the line between being funny and being mean — a sensitive one! — and in a sense he really had a soul of a comedian.

Feynman, the concept of tangent, and a musing on how people think

One time, in mechanical drawing class, some joker picked up a French curve (a piece of plastic for drawing smooth curves—a curly, funny-looking thing) and said, “I wonder if the curves on this thing have some special formula?”

I thought for a moment and said, “Sure they do. The curves are very special curves. Lemme show ya,” and I picked up my French curve and began to turn it slowly. “The French curve is made so that at the lowest point on each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal.” All the guys in the class were holding their French curve up at different angles, holding their pencil up to it at the lowest point and laying it along, and discovering that, sure enough, the tangent is horizontal. They were all excited by this “discovery”—even though they had already gone through a certain amount of calculus and had already “learned” that the derivative (tangent) of the minimum (lowest point) of any curve is zero (horizontal). They didn’t put two and two together. They didn’t even know what they “knew.”

I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way—by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

Feynman and the act of deciding

So when Cornell called a little later, and said they were setting everything up, and it was nearly ready, I said, “I’m sorry, I’ve changed my mind again.”

But I decided then never to decide again. Nothing—absolutely nothing — would ever change my mind again. When you’re young, you have all these things to worry about — should you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but then something else comes up. It’s much easier to just plain decide. Never mind — nothing is going to change your mind.

I did that once when I was a student at MIT. I got sick and tired of having to decide what kind of dessert I was going to have at the restaurant, so I decided it would always be chocolate ice cream, and never worried about it again — I had the solution to that problem.

Anyway, I decided it would always be Caltech.

I realise I completely forgot to highlight any mention to one of the most personally striking things that Feynman did: learning how to draw just for the sake of learning.