How Feynman Learned Physics: The Original Knowledge Path
Before the Nobel Prize and the bongo drums, Feynman rebuilt all of mathematics from first principles in his own notebooks — because he couldn't trust understanding he hadn't built himself.
There is a story most physics students never hear. Before Richard Feynman became the most celebrated physicist of the 20th century — before the Nobel Prize, before the Lectures on Physics that still sell hundreds of thousands of copies, before the Challenger commission and the bongo drums and the Caltech reputation as a man who could dismantle a safe and a problem with equal pleasure — he was a teenager at MIT doing something strange: he threw out the textbooks and rebuilt all of mathematics from scratch in his own notebooks.
