Richard Feynman talks about Algebra

Jan 22, 2014

https://youtu.be/VW6LYuli7VU

From the Pleasure of Finding Things Out. I love the fact that he "outs" algorithms as stuff that can be used to help kids get the answer without knowing what they are doing.

accessed:: 2023-11-18

The Great Vaccinator

https://waaa.wnyc.org/radiolab_podcast/radiolab_podcast20greatvaccinator.mp3/radiolab_podcast20greatvaccinator.mp3_ywr3ahjkcgo_7d3105f4ceea640a7c9df376fa60ffce_43057055.mp3?hash_redirect=1&x-total-bytes=43057055&x-ais-classified=streaming&listeningSessionID=0CD_382_72__176a88639f0d9f459a1123b260a07f59e7746372

Listened to on 2023-03-11

Much like Richard Feynman kept a list of his 12 favorite problems, Maurice Hilleman kept a running list of diseases for which he was working on developing vaccines to remedy.

https://wiki.rel8.dev/bigger_goals

Much like Richard Feynman, Jerry Michalski has 12 big/broad problems he's working on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Xaw72ESdA

According to researcher Danny Hatcher, the "Feynman Technique" was coined by Scott H. Young in the August 22, 2011 YouTube video Learn Faster with The Feynman Technique and the subsequent 2022-09-01 article Learn Faster with Feynman Technique, ostensibly in a summarization of Gleick, James (1992). Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. Pantheon Books. ISBN 0-679-40836-3. OCLC 243743850.

The frequently quoted Einstein that accompanies many instances of the Feynman Technique is also wrong and not said by Einstein.

The root Einstein quote, is apparently as follows:

that all physical theories, their mathematical expressions apart ought to lend themselves to so simple a description 'that even a child could understand them.' —Ronald W. Clark, p418 of Einstein: His Life and Times (1972)

Maths, Logic, Computer Science, Chess, Music, and Dance

A similar observation could be made about mathematics, logic, and computer science. Sadly, public education in the states seems to lose sight that the formalisms in these domains are merely the tools of the trade and not the trade itself (ie, developing an understanding of the fundamental/foundational notions, their relationships, their instantiations, and cultivating how one can develop capacity to "move" in that space).

Similarly, it's as if we encourage children that they need to merely memorize all the movements of chess pieces to appreciate the depth of the game.

Or saying "Here, just memorize these disconnected contortions of the hand upon these strings along this piece of wood. Once you have that down, you've experienced all that guitar, (nay, music itself!) has to offer."

Or "Yes, once, you internalize the words for these moves and recite them verbatim, you will have experienced all the depth and wonder that dance and movement have to offer."

However, none of these examples are given so as to dismiss or ignore the necessity of (at least some level of) formalistic fluency within each of these domains of experience. Rather, their purpose is to highlight the parallels in other domains that may seem (at first) so disconnected from one's own experience, so far from one's fundamental way of feeling the world, that the only plausible reasons one can make to explain why people would waste their time engaging in such acts are 1. folly: they merely do not yet know their activities are absurd, but surely enough time will disabuse them of their foolish ways. 2. madness: they cannot ever know the absurdity of their acts, for "the absurd" and "the astute" are but two names for one and the same thing in their world of chaos. 3. apathy: they in fact do see the absurdity in their continuing of activities which give them no sense of meaning, yet their indifference insurmountably impedes them from changing their course of action. For how could one resist the path of least resistance, a road born of habit, when one must expend energy to do so but that energy can only come from one who cares?

Or at least, these 3 reasons can surely seem like that's all there possibly could be to warrant someone continuing music, chess, dance, maths, logic, computer science, or any apparently alien craft. However, if one takes time to speak to someone who earnestly pursues such "alien crafts", then one may start to perceive intimations of something beyond their current impressions

The contorted clutching of the strings now seems... coordinated. The pensive placement of the pawns now appears... purposeful. The frantic flailing of one's feet now feels... freeing. The movements of one's mind now feels... marvelous.

So the very activity that once seemed so clearly absurd, becomes cognition and shapes perspectives beyond words

Feynman’s approach encouraged him to follow his interests wherever they might lead. He posed questions and constantly

Creating strong and clever connections between disparate areas of knowledge can appear to others to be a flash of genius, in part because they didn't have the prior knowledges nor did they put in the work of collecting, remembering, or juxtaposition.

This method may be one of the primary (only) underpinnings supporting the lone genius myth. This is particularly the case when the underlying ideas were not ones fully developed by the originator. As an example if Einstein had fully developed the ideas of space and time by himself and then put the two together as spacetime, then he's independently built two separate layers, but in reality, he's cleverly juxtaposed two broadly pre-existing ideas and combined them in an intriguing new framing to come up with something new. Because he did this a few times over his life, he's viewed as an even bigger genius, but when we think about what he's done and how, is it really genius or simply an underlying method that may have shaken out anyway by means of statistical thermodynamics of people thinking, reading, communicating, and writing?

Are there other techniques that also masquerade as genius like this, or is this one of the few/only?

Link this to Feynman's mention that his writing is the actual thinking that appears on the pages of his notes. "It's the actual thinking."

Forte cleverly combines a story about Feynman from Genius with a quote about Feynman's 12 favorite problems from a piece by Rota. Did they both appear in Gleick's Genius together and Forte quoted them separately, or did he actively use his commonplace to do the juxtaposition for him and thus create a nice juxtaposition himself or was it Gleick's juxtaposition?

The answer will reveal whether Forte is actively using his system for creative and productive work or if the practice is Gleick's.

You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a

Gian-Carlo Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts (Boston: Birkhäuser Boston, 1997), 202.

Richard Feynman indicated in an interview that he kept a dozen of his favorite problems at the top of his mind. As he encountered new results and tricks, he tried applying them to those problems in hopes of either solving them or in coming up with new ideas. Over time by random but combinatorial chance, solutions or ideas would present themselves as ideas were juxtaposed.

One would suspect that Feynman hadn't actually read Raymond Llull, but this technique sounds very similar to the Llullan combinatorial arts from centuries earlier, albeit in a much more simplified form.

Can we find evidence of Feynman having read or interacted with Llull? Was it independently created or was he influenced?

I had an example of this on 2022-05-28 in Dan Allosso's book club on Equality in the closing minutes where a bit of inspiration hit me to combine the ideas of memes, evolution, and Indigenous knowledge and storytelling to our current political situation. Several of them are problems and ideas I've been working with over years or months, and they came together all at once to present a surprising and useful new combination. #examples

Link this also to the idea of diffuse thinking as a means of solving problems. One can combine the idea of diffuse thinking with combinatorial creativity to super-charge one's problem solving and idea generation capacity this way. What would one call this combination? It definitely needs a name. Llullan combinatorial diffusion, perhaps? To some extent Llull was doing this already as part of his practice, it's just that he didn't know or write explicitly about the diffuse thinking portion (to my knowledge), though this doesn't mean that he wasn't the beneficiary of it in actual practice, particularly when it's known that many of his time practiced lectio divina and meditated on their ideas. Alternately meditating on ideas and then "walking away" from them will by force cause diffuse thinking to be triggered.

Are there people for whom diffuse thinking doesn't work from a physiological perspective? What type of neurodiversity does this cause?

Genius: The Life And Science of Richard Feynman,” James Gleick, Pantheon Books, 1992 (see pg. 409).

The so-called Richard Feynman technique, n'cest pas?

From whom did he crib it? Did he credit them, or was it just distilled into part of the culture?

This is also similar to the rubber duck method of debugging a program in some sense.

This quote is similar and generally related to the Feynman Technique. (see: https://fs.blog/2021/02/feynman-learning-technique/) It's based apparently on quotes attributed to Feynman which include:

• "I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don't understand it."
• "If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't really understand it."