by Jeffry Lamb

         In between reading the amazing Harry Potter books repeatedly and NBA biographies and autobiographies, I once read a book by one of the greatest physicists ever. It is called Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman by Richard P. Feynman. It's a hilarious book recapping many of Feynman's  "Outrageous Adventures."  I'd have to say hilarious is an understatement. I don't enjoy listening to people who are ridiculously smart, but him, along with Albert Einstein are the only people who  I would have gone out of my way to listen to. I'd have to call him my idol in the world of math and physics.  Maybe you heard of him the same way that I have. Euler's formula eⁱq = cos q + i sin q iis usually accompanied by the sentence "R.P Feynman has called it 'this amazing jewel…the most remarkable formula in Mathematics' ". It's because of Feynman's quote that I care to remember how to prove the formula, probably the only thing in the world I could prove on the spot if you asked me to. Telling you some of the stories out of his book though, will probably draw your interest more than his quote on Euler's formula.
        Feynman was a very weird man, and enjoyed playing jokes on his friends, many of which he recounts in his book. In college at MIT his roomates were having an argument whether gravity was the cause of people peeing, so to settle the argument, Feynman urinated while standing on his head, and proved to them that it was not caused by gravity. Later to get back at one of his roommates, Feynman unscrewed his door and hid it downstairs. All the boys had a meeting to find out where the door went, Feynman stood up and said he took it and put it in the basement, but  being a practical joker nobody
believed him, so the door wasn't found until much later. 

         Later, during his graduate years, at Princeton, Feynman was offered a job making bombs at the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos underground. Even though Feynman didn't have any degrees he was still offered the job, turned it down, then decided to take it while thinking about Hitler and the war. During a meeting in which they were supposed to see some of the secret plans from a safe, one of the heads of the project realizes he doesn't know the code to his safe, so Feynman asks if he can try to break it. Feynman was the type of guy who would fool around with things until he figured them out, and had taught himself how to pick locks and safes, so he steps up and attempts to open the safe. While everybody is talking Feynman opens the safe in 10 minutes, to everybody's amazement. He keeps quiet to all of them how he did it, but really the safes were delivered with codes 50-25-50 or 25-50-25, and had to be changed by the owner, but the owner had never bothered to change the code. So here he is labeled as the "safe cracker."  He begins to fool around Los Alamos cracking every safe he can find, with various methods, such as using combinations of math numbers, such as e. He finds a lot of secret information but tells nobody, except  giving hints of his knowledge that he has gained through opening the safes. Eventually, in the end of the chapter he meets the man who was supposed to come open the locked safe in the beginning. They have a discussion with each other, and it turns out the man hired to open the safe couldn't actually open them, he just drilled them and Feynman had saved his job earlier by his lucky safe-cracking techniques.