Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [50]
Developing a theory for reflection by multiple-layer thin films was not so different for Feynman from math team in the now-distant past of Far Rockaway. He could see, or feel, the intertwined infinities of the problem, the beam of light resonating back and forth between the pair of surfaces, and then the next pair, and so on, and he had a giant mental kit bag of formulas to try out. Even when he was fourteen he had manipulated series of continued fractions the way a pianist practices scales. Now he had an intuition for the translating of formulas into physics and back, a feeling for the rhythms or the spaces or the forces that a given set of symbols implied. In his senior year the mathematics department asked him to join a team of three entrants to the nation’s most difficult and prestigious mathematics contest, the Putnam competition, then in its second year. (The top five finishers are named as Putnam Fellows and one receives a scholarship at Harvard.) The problems were intricate exercises in calculus and algebraic manipulation; no one was expected to complete them all satisfactorily in the allotted time. In some years the median has been zero—more than half the entrants fail to solve a single problem. One of Feynman’s fraternity brothers was surprised to see him return home while the examination was still going on. Feynman learned later that the scorers had been astounded by the gap between his result and the next four. Harvard sounded him out about the scholarship, but he told them he had already decided to go elsewhere: to Princeton.
His first thought had been to remain at MIT. He believed that no other American institution rivaled it and he said so to his department chairman. Slater had heard this before from loyal students whose provincial world contained nothing but Boston and the Tech, or the Bronx and the Tech, or Flatbush and the Tech. He told Feynman flatly that he would not be allowed back as a graduate student—for his own good.
Slater and Morse communicated directly with their colleagues at Princeton in January 1939, signaling that Feynman was something special. One said his record was “practically perfect,” the other that he had been “the best undergraduate student we have had in the Physics Department for five years at least.” At Princeton, when Feynman’s name came up in the deliberations of the graduate admissions committee, the phrase “diamond in the rough” kept materializing out of the wash of conversation. The committee had seen its share of one-sided applicants but had never before admitted a student with such low scores in history and English on the Graduate Record Examination. Feynman’s history score was in the bottom fifth, his literature score in the bottom sixth; and 93 percent of those who took the test had given better answers about fine arts. His physics and mathematics scores were the best the committee had seen. In fact the physics score was perfect.
Princeton had another problem with Feynman, as the head of its department, H. D. Smyth, made clear to Morse. “One question always arises, particularly with men interested in theoretical physics,” Smyth wrote.
Is Feynman Jewish? We have no definite rule against Jews but have to keep their proportion in our department reasonably small because of the difficulty of placing them.
By March no word had come and Slater was concerned enough to write Smyth again, collegially: “Dear Harry … definitely the best undergraduate we have had for a number of years … first-rate both in matters of scholarship and personality …” The recommendation was formal and conventional, but in a handwritten postscript that would