[8]Feynman, R. P., Leighton, R. B., and Sands, M., 1965, The Feynman Lectures on Physics , Vol. 1±3 … Editing Feynman’s lecture notes on computation has now stimulated him to have a … Richard Feynman and computation T ONY H EY The enormous contribution of Richard Feynman to modern physics is well known, both to teaching through his famous Feynman Lectures on Physics , and to research with his Feynman diagram approach to quantum®eld theory and his path integral formulation of quantum mechanics. Less well known perhaps is his …

1. Introduction The Feynman Lectures on Computation [1]were®nally published in Septemb er 1996, some eight years after his death. How did an English Professor of Computer Science come to be editing Feynm an’slecturesgivenat Caltechwhich he did not even attend? In November 1987, I received a phone call in Southampton from Helen Tuck, Feynman’ssecretary for many years, saying that Feynmanwantedme to help write up his lecture notes on computation. Sixteen years earlier, asapost-doc at Caltech, I had declined the opportunity to work with Finn Ravndal on editing Feynman’s`Parton’ lectures[2]on the grounds that it would be a distraction from my research. I had often regretted my decision so I did not take much persuading this time around. At Caltechinthe early 1970s, I had been a theoretical particle physicist, but ten years later, on a sabbatical visit to Caltech in 1981, I became interested in computational physics-play- ingwithMonte Carlo and variational methods that Ilater found out were similar to techniques Feynmanhadused years before at Los Alamos. While I was therein 1981, Carver Mead gave a memorable lecture about the future of VLSI-Very Large Scale Integration-and the semiconductor industry. I returned to Southampton inspired by Mead’s vision of the future and set about exploring the potential of parallel computing for computational science. Four years later, I completed my move from physics to computer science, when I moved to the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton. Two years after that, I received the call from Helen Tuck. Theoçcialrecordat Caltech[3]lists Feynmanasjoining with John Hop®eld and Carver Mead in the fall of 1981 to give an interdisciplinary course entitled`The Physics of Computation’. The course was given for two years although Feynmanwasill with cancer during the®rstyearand Mead on sabbatical for much of the second. A handout from the course of 1982 / 83 reveals the¯avorof the course: a basic primer on computation, computability and information theory followed by a section titled`Limits on computation arising in the physical world and `fundamental’ limits on computation .’The lectures that year were mainly given by Feynman and Hop®eld with guest lectures from experts such asMarvin Minsky, Charles Bennett and John Cocke…

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