The great Polish-American probabilist, Mark Kac (pronounced Kotz), who made important contributions to the field of mathematical physics, once gave a lecture at Caltech. At the end of the lecture, a brash young member of the audience stood up and said:
If all mathematics disappeared, it would set physics back precisely (by) one week.
A lesser mortal might have been rattled by such a brusque, and in-the-face response. Kac, however, was unflustered and retorted spontaneously:
Yes, indeed! I know of that week. Precisely the week in which God created the world.
The young man was none other than Richard Feynman, who probably saw through the problem Kac was talking about in his own inimitable and intuitive way, but without the frills of heavy mathematics.
Kac and Feynman were colleagues at Cornell for a period of time and independently arrived at the famous Kac-Feynman formula, the former using mathematics and the latter, physics. This is what Kac had to say about Feynman:
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