Feynman's Work Algorithms

A 300-case reverse-engineered decision tree of Richard Feynman's derivational habits as displayed across the Feynman Lectures on Physics, major books, Nobel lecture, selected scientific papers, gravitation lectures, computation lectures, and late strong-interaction lectures. The reconstruction treats each case as evidence for a way of thinking: isolate the experiment, define the observable, test limits, use symmetry, localize fields, add amplitudes before probabilities, and reduce matter to microscopic mechanisms.

33 strategies300 casesall 115 FLP chaptersbooks · papers · lecturesFeynman-era reconstruction
01The Feynman Decision Tree

The project reconstructs public working methods from lectures, books, papers, and archival descriptions. It is not a claim to read Feynman's private cognition. Post-Feynman physics is excluded as an assumption; posthumously published notes are used only when the underlying lecture or manuscript content comes from Feynman's lifetime.

Face a physical phenomenon or calculation
What makes the problem intelligible?

Strategy prevalence ranking — 33 strategies

Overlapping strategy prevalence: percentage = cases using this strategy / 300; totals may exceed 100% · click any bar

02Corpus — 300 Lecture / Paper / Chapter Cases

The corpus includes every chapter of The Feynman Lectures on Physics and then expands across major books, scientific papers, public lectures, technical reports, gravitation lectures, computation lectures, and late strong-interaction lectures. Entries are derived summaries: titles and high-level theses/results, not copied lecture text.

#SourceCaseMain thesis/resultPrimary strategy path
03Source Spine and Limits

The Caltech online FLP edition is treated as a read-online source spine; this page does not reproduce lecture prose. Archival Feynman material is vast and partly permission-controlled, so “300 cases” means a broad reconstructed working corpus, not an exhaustive edition of every archival page.

04Worked Demonstrations

Each demonstration shows the subquestions that move from a physical phenomenon to a Feynman-style result.