Feynman, 13, tricked a librarian to borrow a calculus book and taught himself
techNmak · x · 2026-11-10
Around age 13, Richard Feynman wanted to learn calculus, but in the early 1930s the highest math course at Far Rockaway High School was trigonometry. When a librarian questioned why a child wanted J. E. Thompson's Calculus for the Practical Man, he claimed it was for his father — then taught himself the whole book.
His small green notebook survives at the Niels Bohr Library & Archives, filled with handwritten explanations, copied diagrams, formulas, and an index he built himself. The photo shows the 1946 second edition; Feynman learned from an earlier 1930s printing.
He later recalled his father struggling with the opening pages: "It was the first time I realized that I could understand what he couldn't understand." The teen went on to MIT, Princeton, the Manhattan Project, and a share of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics for quantum electrodynamics, even inventing his own mathematical notation along the way.
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