Carl Feynman

He didn't mind being that.

And at other times, well, he did some pretty impressive stuff.

And he wasn't afraid to say, yeah, I did some pretty impressive stuff.

I worked with him later at Thinking Machines Corporation, and he was clearly very into computation by that point, very interested all over it.

He felt like physics was kind of tapped out, that he was past the point of making contributions because both he had changed and the field had changed.

And so he was more interested in computing.

The machine we were building was called a connection machine.

It was a very strange computer.

And he figured out a way to get it to do cosines and logarithms and other transcendental functions.

It was very poor at multiplication, but it was very good at addition and shuffling bits around.

And he figured out a way to do transcendental functions without multiplication, just by using the patterns of the bits to do something extremely clever, whose details I no longer remember.