Yes, one of my favorites from Surely You're Joking - to learn what the symbols on mechanical blueprints for a plant meant Feynman pointed at an unknown (to him) symbol and said, "What happens if this valve gets stuck?"
My test shot did get a response too when, in addition to Roger's recollection - On 2012/05/11 05:18 , Jeffrey Shallit wrote: > > It was 1973. I do remember computing lots of things like that in > a small workspace, but I don't have any memory of that precise > incident! > I'm not surprised to be off by a year... and as expected, he didn't remember the incident. But it was 16 years before the Feynman book. On 2012/05/11 10:19 , km wrote: > The story is on page 124 of Feynman's "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" > > Sent from my iPad > > > On May 11, 2012, at 11:56 AM, Roger Hui<[email protected]> wrote: > >> The Feynman story I remember was that he was shown a complicated >> engineering diagram. He pointed to a place at random and asked, "are you >> sure this works?" >> >> >> >> On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 11:48 PM, Joey K Tuttle<[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> Well, clearly Ron's idea for the humorous notation didn't come from the >>> Feynman book as it wasn't published until 18 years later... >>> >>> By the way, I just dropped a PDF of Surely You're Joking into iBook on my >>> iPad. It is a fun book that I will enjoy reading again. But searches for >>> phrases and digit didn't turn up a similar story... >>> >>> - joey iPa... >>> >>> On May 10, 2012, at 14:23, Roger Hui<[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>>>> Ron Frank came in, looked at the copy on his desk, circled a >>>>> digit towards the end of the long number and wrote, "Are you sure about >>>>> this digit?" and put it back on the Desk Jeff was using. >>>> This sounds very much like an anecdote in Richard Feynman's *Surely >>> You're >>>> Joking, Mr. Feynman?* But then my memory is going too. >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 1:52 PM, Joey K Tuttle<[email protected]> wrote: >>>> >>>>> Upon looking a little more at the page - >>>>> >>>>> http://zenwerx.com/projects/pi-digits/pi/ >>>>> >>>>> mentioned in the post below, I was amused to note that the last 138 of >>>>> the 4,194,304 places of pi displayed on that page are random and/or >>>>> wrong. Problems begin about decimal place 4194166 which is shown as 9 >>>>> but should be 7. I suppose such errors are not very high up on the list >>>>> of misrepresentations on web pages, but in my case it caused a smile and >>>>> memory of an event that took place some 40 years ago. >>>>> >>>>> Jeffery Shallit ( http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~shallit/ ) was a summer >>>>> intern at the IBM Philadelphia Scientific Center in 1972 (I think). He >>>>> was working on some high precision computations using APL. I can't >>>>> remember whether it was a precise evaluation of pi to several thousand >>>>> places, or perhaps Mersenne prime #24 ( _1 + 2^19937x ) - but in any >>>>> case, Jeffery had succeeded in printing out this lengthy number, and >>>>> left a copy of the pages of digits on several people's desks. The next >>>>> morning, Ron Frank came in, looked at the copy on his desk, circled a >>>>> digit towards the end of the long number and wrote, "Are you sure about >>>>> this digit?" and put it back on the Desk Jeff was using. >>>>> >>>>> That afternoon, Jeff came in and discovered the note and raced into >>>>> Ron's office saying, "How do you know that digit is wrong??" To which >>>>> Ron calmly replied, "I have no idea if it is correct or not - I was just >>>>> asking if you were sure...." >>>>> >>>>> I was (am still) impressed with Jeffery's work because he did it in an >>>>> 80Kbyte APL workspace. Hard to imagine these days when it is routine to >>>>> work with a hundred thousand times that much memory.... Although I note >>>>> that J only consumes 80704 bytes to calculate _1 + 2^19937x that's >>>>> impressive too. >>>>> >>>>> I've copied Jeffery on this note, and wish I had an address to pass my >>>>> memory past Ron. In my experience, it seems likely to me that either >>>>> they wouldn't have any memory of such an event, or might have versions >>>>> quite different from my memory. It is strange/interesting how our >>>>> memories work. >>>>> >>>>> On 2012/05/08 09:44 , Joey K Tuttle wrote: >>>>>> Being a fan of things pi, I'm wondering about several things in your >>>>> post. >>>>>> The URL you give points to a site purporting to have 4 (not 50) million >>>>>> digits of pi. Maybe I missed a pointer to a larger dataset. >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> On 2012/05/08 03:56 , Joe Bohart wrote: >>>>>> >>>>>> I've load 50 million integer digits of pi and trying to do a moving >>>>> average >>>>>> on them. >>>>>> >>>>>> NB. data from http://zenwerx.com/projects/pi-digits/pi/ >>>>>> NB. used perl to write each digits on 1 line of file data >>>>>> >>>>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
