Mental Arithmetic

• Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick
  Little, Brown, 532 pp, £18.99, October 1992, ISBN 0 316 90316 7

Richard Feynman was one of the élite group of American and British physicists who developed atomic weapons with the Manhattan project in the Second World War. He flashed back into the public eye in 1965, when he won a share of the Nobel physics prize, and again two decades later when his formidable presence on the committee inquiring into the crash of the Challenger space shuttle forced the cause of the disaster into the open.