NOBEL-WINNING PHYSICIST RICHARD FEYNMAN'S PERSONAL COPY OF MATHEMATICAL METHODS OF PHYSICS, BEARING HIS OWNER SIGNATURE AND SEVERAL ANNOTATIONS
(FEYNMAN, Richard P.) MATHEWS, Jon and WALKER, R.L. Mathematical Methods of Physics. Menlo Park, California: W.A. Benjamin, (1970). Octavo, original blue-green paper boards. Housed in a cutom clamshell box.
Second edition of one of the classic books on math in physics, Richard Feynman's own copy with his owner signature and several autograph annotations.
Mathematical Methods of Physics—still a valuable and popular text—discusses Fourier methods as applied to temporal signal processing. It deals with the effects of noise and fluctuations, filtering, power spectra, and much more. Written by Mathews and Walker, two of Feynman's colleagues at Caltech, the work was likely essential reading for Feynman. Mathews and Walkers' emphasis on mathematics for physicists would have appealed to Feynman who showed a firm preference for complex applied math throughout his life, even as a teenager when he borrowed Calculus for the Practical Man from the public library. The first edition was published in 1964. Without dust jacket. This is Feynman's personal copy of Mathematical Methods and, in addition to his owner signature, contains annotations on page 312, "OMIT The equ. ^ to solve is for f(x) for x>0, then for x<0 is just quadrature"; "page 314, "[equations]"; page 316, "OMIT"; and page 337, "Bad [equations]." Richard Feynman was an "American theoretical physicist who was widely regarded as the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in his field in the post-World War II era. Feynman remade quantum electrodynamics—the theory of the interaction between light and matter—and thus altered the way science understands the nature of waves and particles. He was co-awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965 for this work, which tied together in an experimentally perfect package all the varied phenomena at work in light, radio, electricity, and magnetism. The other co-winners of the Nobel Prize, Julian S. Schwinger of the United States and Tomonaga Shin'ichiro [sic] of Japan, had independently created equivalent theories, but it was Feynman's that proved the most original and far-reaching. The problem-solving tools that he invented—including pictorial representations of particle interactions known as Feynman diagrams—permeated many areas of theoretical physics in the second half of the 20th century" (Britannica).
Book extremely good, with a bit of rubbing and soiling to boards.