Ebook rtf mathematics Feynman, Richard Surely You’…

Bringing Culture to the Physicists 
Nina Byers, a professor at UCLA, became in charge of the physics colloquium sometime in the early seventies. The colloquia are normally a 
place where physicists from other universities come and talk pure technical stuff. But partly as a result of the atmosphere of that particular period of 
time, she got the idea that the physicists needed more culture, so she thought she would arrange something along those lines: Since Los Angeles is 
near Mexico, she would have a colloquium on the mathematics and astronomy of the Mayans--the old civilization of Mexico. 
(Remember my attitude to culture: This kind of thing would have driven me 
crazy
if it were in my university!) 
She started looking for a professor to lecture on the subject, and couldn't find anybody at UCLA who was quite an expert. She telephoned 
various places and still couldn't find anybody. 
Then she remembered Professor Otto Neugebauer, of Brown University, the great expert on Babylonian mathematics.* She telephoned him in 
Rhode Island and asked if he knew someone on the West Coast who could lecture on Mayan mathematics and astronomy. 
[* When I was a young professor at Cornell, Professor Neugebauer had come one year to give a sequence of lectures, called the Messenger 
Lectures, on Babylonian mathematics. They were wonderful, Oppenheimer lectured the next year. I remember thinking to myself, "Wouldn't it be 
nice to come, someday, and be able to give lectures like that!" Some years later, when I was refusing invitations to lecture at various places, I was 
invited to give the Messenger Lectures at Cornell. Of course I couldn't refuse, because I had put that in my mind so I accepted an invitation to go over 
to Bob Wilson's house for a weekend and we discussed various ideas. The result was a series of lectures called "The Character of Physical Law."] 
"Yes," he said. "I do. He's not a professional anthropologist or a historian; he's an amateur. But he certainly knows a lot about it. His name is 
Richard Feynman." 
She nearly died! She's trying to bring some culture to the physicists, and the only way to do it is to get a physicist! 
The only reason I knew anything about Mayan mathematics was that I was getting exhausted on my honeymoon in Mexico with my second wife, 
Mary Lou. She was greatly interested in •art history, particularly that of Mexico. So we went to Mexico for our honeymoon and we climbed up 
pyramids and down pyramids; she had me following her all over the place. She showed me many interesting things, such as certain relationships in 
the designs of various figures, but after a few days (and nights) of going up and down in hot and steamy jungles, I was exhausted. 
In some little Guatemalan town in the middle of nowhere we went into a museum that had a case displaying a manuscript full of strange symbols, 
pictures, and bars and dots. It was a copy (made by a man named Villacorta) of the Dresden Codex, an original book made by the Mayans found in a 
museum in Dresden. I knew the bars and dots were numbers. My father had taken me to the New York World's Fair when I was a little kid, and there 
they had reconstructed a Mayan temple. I remembered him telling me how the Mayans had invented the zero and had done many interesting things. 
The museum had copies of the codex for sale, so I bought one. On each page at the left was the codex copy, and on the right a description and