Word: magicianly
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They were free to gamble the chips at games operated by student croupiers, including Blackjack, Clap's Rouet, poker and The Wheel of Fortune. A caricature artist, a D.J. and Bonaparte the Magician also entertained the "gamblers...
...There are two kinds of geniuses," the eminent mathematician Mark Kac once remarked. "An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better." The other kind Kac called magicians. "Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark . . . Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber...
What made Feynman a magician, though, was not any one of these achievements by itself, but the way he went about them. One of the common-nonsensical premises of quantum physics is that particles can travel from one place to another without traversing the space in between, and Feynman's thought process seemed to go from problem to solution in just about the same way. He rarely studied what was already known about a problem before attacking it. He was more interested in getting the solution than in doing the problem according to the rules, and he often ended...
...hero; a man who rarely taught classes or took on doctoral students but is regarded as one of physics' great teachers. If some questions remain about exactly what made Feynman Feynman, and not just a garden-variety genius, that is no fault of Gleick's. A magician who reveals all his secrets, even from beyond the grave, is a magician no longer...
...Genie makes dozens of eyeblink metamorphoses: a Scotsman, a Scots dog, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Senor Wences, Ed Sullivan, Groucho Marx, a French waiter, a turkey, the crows from Dumbo, Eddie (Rochester) Anderson, a rabbit, a dinosaur, William F. Buckley Jr., Robert De Niro, a stewardess, a bashful sheep, Pinocchio, a magician, a Jean Gabin-style Frenchman, Sebastian the crab from The Little Mermaid, Arsenio Hall, a finicky tailor, Walter Brennan, a TV parade host and hostess, Ethel Merman, Rodney Dangerfield, Jack Nicholson, a talking lampshade, a bee, a U- boat, a one-man band and a quartet of cheerleaders. Many...