x.com/Fintech03/status/2050800266723708991
1 correction found
Feynman once walked into the math department at Caltech & challenged the mathematicians to a duel. He asked them to name any theorem, no matter how complex, & promised he could explain it using common sense & basic physics.
Feynman’s own version places this episode at Princeton, not Caltech, and describes it as a bet about whether he could judge a theorem true or false from an informal statement—not a Caltech ‘duel’ or a promise to explain any theorem with basic physics.
Full reasoning
In Feynman’s memoir, this anecdote is explicitly set during his Princeton years: he says that, as a student in the Princeton physics department, he used to challenge people in the math department. His challenge was also narrower than this post claims: he bet that there wasn’t a theorem they could state in terms he could understand where he couldn’t immediately say whether it was true or false. That is not the same as “walking into the math department at Caltech,” nor is it a record of him promising to explain any theorem using “common sense & basic physics.”
The Princeton setting matters because the post turns a real Feynman anecdote into a different historical scene at a different institution. And the wording of the challenge matters because Feynman was talking about making a quick intuitive true/false judgment from an informal statement, not offering a general explanatory reduction of advanced mathematics to basic physics.
2 sources
- How would you have answered Richard Feynman's challenge? - MathOverflow
Feynman recall when, as a student of the Princeton physics department, he used to challenge the students of the math department: "I challenged them: 'I bet there isn't a single theorem that you can tell me ... where I can't tell you right away whether it's true or false.'"
- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (course PDF mirror)
"We physicists were laughing ... Topology was not at all obvious ... Then I got an idea. I challenged them: 'I bet there isn't a single theorem that you can tell me ... where I can't tell you right away whether it's true or false.'" The same excerpt is presented as part of Feynman's Princeton-era anecdotes.