Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985) is the beloved collection of anecdotes from Richard P. Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, as told to his friend Ralph Leighton.

Ranging from his boyhood experiments and radio-repair hustles to his work on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos — where he cracked safes and baffled security for fun — the book paints a portrait of one of the twentieth century's most original minds. Feynman recounts learning to draw, playing frigideira in a Brazilian samba band, picking up languages, decoding Mayan mathematics, and puncturing pomposity wherever he found it, always driven by an insatiable, mischievous curiosity.

More a celebration of a way of thinking than a conventional autobiography, the book is funny, irreverent, and quietly inspiring, insisting that the world is more interesting and more knowable than we assume. A perennial favorite for anyone curious about science, learning, and living an unconventional life.