Physicist Leonard Susskind presents a TED Talk about the Richard Feynman he knew, the person and the scientist.

Feynman was the rare physicist famous enough to be featured in People magazine. From a 1985 piece: “As a young scientist at Los Alamos during the development of the A-bomb, Richard Feynman delighted in exposing security lapses by picking the locks on safes and filing cabinets that contained top secret information, leaving behind notes signed, ‘Same guy.’ But there were even earlier warning signals that the Nobel prizewinning physicist and California Institute of Technology professor had, as one friend says, ‘a mind that works differently from other people’s.’ As a toddler in Far Rockaway, N.Y., his father, Mel, a uniform salesman, read him excerpts from the Encyclopedia Britannica. And as a teenager he read advanced calculus for pleasure.

Now Feynman, 67 and considered one of the world’s top theoretical physicists, can claim another achievement: his deliciously amusing autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (W. Norton, $16.95). Co-authored by Ralph Leighton, a math teacher who started taping conversations with his friend Feynman seven years ago, the book spent 14 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, a surprise to practically everybody—including the author. ‘I had no purpose in doing the book other than to amuse my friends,’ says Feynman.

A picturesque, unscientific collection of anecdotes, including instructions for picking up a woman in a bar, Surely You’re Joking has earned Feynman $56,000 so far and has elicited reaction from some unexpected quarters. ‘I got a call from a topless dancer,’ he says, ‘who claims we had a mutual acquaintance 15 years ago.'”