re: Biography of Hans Albrecht Bethe
He was my former wife's major professor at Cornell. She almost worshipped him, and ultimately left physics and went into medicine because she couldn't imagine ever being able to keep with the likes of him.
Her stories of watching Bethe and some of the other guys discussing physics in front of a blackboard upon which they would write nothing as they created, modified, and argued about equations were fascinating. She said they talked math the way we use English.
Arf