Richard P. Feynman

Feynman worked on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos in his twenties, cracked his colleagues' safes for entertainment, and shared the 1965 Nobel for quantum electrodynamics. Surely You're Joking is not an autobiography so much as a set of anecdotes he told aloud and Ralph Leighton wrote down: safe-cracking, samba drumming, teaching physics in Brazil, winning bar bets. Some of the stories about women have aged into an argument of their own, and he did not soften them. On the Challenger inquiry he dropped an O-ring seal into iced water on camera and ended the dispute about the cause. He taught at Caltech and died in 1988.