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his audience how to compute a logarithm from scratch and showed how the numbers converged as he took successive square roots often and thus, as an inevitable by-product, derived the “natural base” e, that ubiquitous fundamental constant. He was recapitulating centuries of mathematical history—yet not quite recapitulating, because only a modern shift of perspective made it possible to see the fabric whole. Having conceived of complex powers, he began to compute complex powers. He made a table of his results and showed how they oscillated, swinging from one to zero to negative one and back again in a wave that he drew for his audience, though they knew perfectly well what a sine wave looked like. He had arrived at trigonometric functions. Now he posed one more question, as fundamental as all the others, yet encompassing them all in the round recursive net he had been spinning for a mere hour: To what power must e be raised to reach i? (They already knew the answer, that e and i and ? were conjoined as if by an invisible membrane, but as he told his mother, “I went pretty fast & didn’t give them a hell of a lot of time to work out the reason for one fact before I was showing them another still more amazing.”) He now repeated the assertion he had written elatedly in his notebook at the age of fourteen, that the oddly polyglot statement eπi + 1 = 0 was the most remarkable formula in mathematics. Algebra and geometry, their distinct languages notwithstanding, were one and the same, a bit of child’s arithmetic abstracted and generalized by a few minutes of the purest logic. “Well,” he wrote, “all the mighty minds were mightily impressed by my little feats of arithmetic.”

Indeed, if Feynman was, as his friend Welton thought, consciously trying to establish himself among these influential physicists, he was succeeding even more than he knew. As early as November 1943, seven months after the Los Alamos project began, Oppenheimer began trying to persuade his department at Berkeley to hire Feynman for after the war. He wrote to the department chairman, Birge:

He is by all odds the most brilliant young physicist here, and everyone knows this. He is a man of thoroughly engaging character and personality, extremely clear, extremely normal in all respects, and an excellent teacher with a warm feeling for physics in all its aspects.

Oppenheimer warned that Feynman was sure to have other job offers, because “a not inconsiderable number of ‘big shots’” had already noticed him. He quoted two of the big shots. Bethe, according to Oppenheimer, had said bluntly that he would sooner lose any two scientists than lose Feynman. And Wigner of Princeton had made what was, for a physicist’s physicist in the 1940s, perhaps the ultimate tribute.

“He is a second Dirac,” Wigner said, “only this time human.”

Fenced In

Feynman celebrated his wedding anniversary by grilling steak outdoors at the Presbyterian Sanatorium in a small charcoal broiler that Arline had ordered from a catalog. She also got him a chef’s hat, apron, and gloves. He wore them self-consciously, along with his new mustache, while she reveled in the domesticity of it all, until he could no longer stand the idea of people watching him from passing cars. She laughed, asking, as she so often did, why he cared what other people thought. Steak was an extravagance—eighty-four cents for two pounds. With it they ate watermelon, plums, and potato chips. The hospital lawn sloped down to Route 66, the cross-country highway, where the traffic roared by. Albuquerque was sweltering, and they were happy. Arline talked to her parents by long-distance telephone for seven minutes, another extravagance. After Richard left to hitchhike back north, a late-afternoon thundershower blackened the desert. Arline worried about him in the downpour. She still had not gotten used to the raw force of storms in the open West.

His near-weekly trips through the valley that lay between the Jemez and Sangre de Cristo mountains made him a rarity on the mesa. Few residents of that hermetic community had occasion