Almost 50 years ago, in September 1935, unnoticed among the as-yet-undifferentiated horde of entering freshmen at MIT were two ambitious, rather diffident physicists-to-be. One was Dick Feynman and the other was the author of these recollections. Initially unknown to one another,we remained so for the freshman year, since MIT grouped its students into classes by major. I was Course VIII (physics) from the beginning, while Feynman briefly vacillated, finding electrical engineering too practical after one semester and mathematics too abstract after another semester. My first hint of what was to come was on the occasion of the annual spring open house in 1936, when I found at one of the mathematics exhibits a fresh-faced kid (almost precisely my age, actually) who seemed to have a thorough comprehension of the concept of the Fourier transform and of the operation of the mechanical harmonic analyzer. Up to this point, I had nourished...

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