Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman

  • Author: Richard Feynman
  • Page count: 356
  • Started on: 2025/09/21
  • Finished on: 2025/09/27
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    • ★★★☆☆

Book cover of "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character" by Richard P. Feynman, with an introduction by Bill Gates. The cover features a black-and-white photo of Richard Feynman smiling, leaning casually against a desk in front of a chalkboard. Text highlights it as a New York Times bestseller.

Richard Feynman was an American theoretical physicist, Nobel Prize winner, and gifted teacher, best known for his work in quantum electrodynamics, his engaging lectures, and his playful, curious personality.

I expected this book to be a guided tour through some of his work and his teachings, but it turned out to be more of a memoir told through anecdotes. Now, Feynman was a gifted speaker and writer, but hundreds of pages of single-page anecdotes were a bit much for me.

The stories are always entertaining and cover small aspects of a lot of Feynman’s life. I mostly enjoyed the chapters that went a bit deeper into a single topic, such as the experience on the Manhattan project - trying to do research while the Los Alamos site was still being constructed.

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