Feynman, Richard P.

"DICK WAS A TRULY GREAT TEACHER, PERHAPS THE GREATEST OF HIS ERA AND OURS." – David Goodstein, Feynman's colleague at Caltech

In this letter home to his mother, a 25 year-old Richard Feynman discusses his love of teaching, and his ability to take difficult concepts and teach them in clear and clever ways. Feynman elaborates upon his presentation of "some interesting properties of numbers" to the math club at Los Alamos; he notes that "all the mighty minds were mightily impressed by my little feats of arithmetic," such that "they'd come up to me in the halls with proofs of various things I had showed the night before."

Finding the profound in the mundane, and making the complicated clear, were hallmarks of Feynman throughout his life, and we see them on display here in the writings of a young Feynman at Los Alamos.

Interestingly, he also mentions that he hasn't yet "worked on Papa's codes," referring to the fact that Melville Feynman would often send him coded messages during his time at Los Alamos; he would later say this helped him know "exactly what could get through [the censors] and what could not get through. Nobody else knew as well as I."

Richard Feynman's autograph letter reads, in part:

"Instead, I gave, last Thursday, a little talk. We have a math club up here which meets once in 2 weeks. I had to give the second talk in the series. My subject was, "Some interesting properties of numbers." It was all arithmetic ⁠— nothing harder ⁠— just arithmetic. I had some nerve showing just arithmetic to all the mighty minds around here ⁠— but I swear that was all it was. Unfortunately I didn't have any problem whose answer was 7 oranges so you might not have enjoyed it. But Moose + Pop would have had a swell time.

Well, all the mighty minds were mightily impressed by my little feats of arithmetic. The marvelous things, apparently without explanation which I demonstrated numbers would do before their very eyes. Then, zip, ⁠— I'd reveal the explanation + all would be clear. They should have known it all the time ⁠— of course."

REFERENCES:

Published in Michelle Feynman, ed. Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track. The Letters of Richard P. Feynman. New York: Basic Books, 2005, pp. 31-33.

Goodstein, David L. "Richard P. Feynman, Teacher." Physics Today, 42, 2 (1989), p. 70.