Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

The preface describes how Ralph Leighton, the co-author of this book, gathered the stories of Richard Feynman’s life. Feynman and Leighton played drums together, and Leighton admired him for his unusual life and the eccentric curiosity with which Feynman approached the world.

The 2018 edition of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! celebrates the 100th anniversary of the physicist’s birth. Though Feynman passed away in 1988, three years after the original publication, Leighton writes that his friend’s spirit and contributions live on, so much so that Leighton has launched a webpage dedicated to the scientist’s life and his work: www.feynman.com.

Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and an icon of the contemporary tech world, offers a short introduction to the 2018 edition, which attests to Gates’s emotional and intellectual attachments to Feynman. Gates says that he “fell” for the physicist by watching films of his lectures that he checked out of a library. Impressed with the physicist’s teaching, Gates reports that he later helped make these lectures available online for free.

Gate’s introduction also highlights several key themes of the book: the power that can come from being a “geek”; how to work well in a group; the importance of a sense of humor; how people build myths about themselves; and how luck, when it is accompanied by wisdom and intellect, can often be a scientist’s greatest asset.