Richard Feynman’s “Lost Lecture:” An Animated Retelling [Video]

Nobel prize-win­ning physi­cist Richard Feyn­man is “famous in a num­ber of dimen­sions,” says sci­ence and math explain­er Grant Sander­son of the YouTube chan­nel 3blue1brown in the video above. “To sci­en­tists, he’s a giant of 20th cen­tu­ry physics… to the pub­lic, he’s a refresh­ing con­tra­dic­tion to the stereo­types about physi­cists: a safe-crack­ing, bon­go-play­ing, mild­ly phi­lan­der­ing non-con­formist.” Feyn­man is also famous, or infa­mous, for his role in the Man­hat­tan Project and the build­ing of the first atom­ic bomb, after which the FBI kept tabs on him to make sure he would­n’t, like his col­league Klaus Fuchs, turn over nuclear secrets to the Sovi­ets.

He may have led an excep­tion­al­ly event­ful life for an aca­d­e­m­ic sci­en­tist, but to his stu­dents, he was first and fore­most “an excep­tion­al­ly skill­ful teacher… for his uncan­ny abil­i­ty to make com­pli­cat­ed top­ics feel nat­ur­al and approach­able.” Feynman’s teach­ing has since influ­enced mil­lions of read­ers of his wild­ly pop­u­lar mem­oirs and his …