His motto "What I cannot create, I do not understand" has been one of the driving forces in my own quest to understand more about the world around me. A good friend had picked up a corollary which was "What I cannot teach, I do not understand" which I think was quite similar. Definitely one of my heroes.
Richard Feynman having the quantum Hall effect on his "to learn" list is amazing. I mean, it makes sense, because less than three years before he died the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for its discovery. But it shows that even one of the greatest physicists of his generation had not fully grasped something that is now part of every undergraduate physics degree's standard curriculum and is arguably much less complicated than, say, Feynman's contributions to Quantum Electrodynamics.
I finally put my whiteboard back up that’s been down since before Covid. It still had scribblings of a novel merge sort with lower space overhead that turned out to be an artifact of non-representative sample inputs. As Bletchley Park taught us, humans are terrible at randomness.
No piece of software replicates the experience of having a board to write things on (or magnet things to, if yours is ferromagnetic like mine). The ones that come closest, that money is better spent on something else.
ChuckMcM ·19 hours ago
Show replies
sigmoid10 ·20 hours ago
Show replies
JKCalhoun ·17 hours ago
It stands there as a testimonial to our brevity on this planet, to all that we will not see, do, understand.
So it goes, I guess.
Show replies
kensai ·2 hours ago
Show replies
hinkley ·19 hours ago
No piece of software replicates the experience of having a board to write things on (or magnet things to, if yours is ferromagnetic like mine). The ones that come closest, that money is better spent on something else.
Show replies