Richard Feyman at Thinking Machines

Great article about Richard Feyman's time at Thinking Machines. This guy was a pure scientist.

"That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard." For Richard a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right. Either way, he was interested. By the end of lunch he had agreed to spend the summer working at the company."

".... we informed Richard that his assignment would be to advise on the application of parallel processing to scientific problems. 'That sounds like a bunch of baloney,' he said. 'Give me something real to do.'"

"When I got back to Boston I went to the library and discovered a book by Kimura on the subject, and much to my disappointment, all of our "discoveries" were covered in the first few pages. When I called back and told Richard what I had found, he was elated. 'Hey, we got it right!' he said. 'Not bad for amateurs.'"

http://www.longnow.org/views/essays/articles/ArtFeynman.php