The Feynman method as an effective learning tool

In the series on personal knowledge management, I made use of a technique called the Feynman method. Since this method is not only useful for note-taking, but also works as a general learning and problem-solving tool, I’d like to discuss it in a little more detail.

Left: Richard Phillips Feynman (1918–1988), photo from his duty pass during his time at Los Alamos in the 1940s. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: Los Alamos National Laboratory allowed anyone to use it for any purpose, provided that the copyright holder is properly attributed. Redistribution, derivative work, commercial use, and all other use is permitted. LANL requires the following text be used when crediting images to it: Unless otherwise indicated, this information has been authored by an employee or employees of the Los Alamos National Security, LLC (LANS), operator of the Los Alamos National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC52-06NA25396 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The U.S. Government has rights to use, reproduce, and distribute this information. The public may copy and use this information without charge, provided that this Notice and any statement of authorship are reproduced on all copies. Neither the Government nor LANS makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any liability or responsibility for the use of this information.) – Right: Richard Feynman 1965, when he received the Nobel Prize for Physics. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: public domain).

The Feynman method

The Feynman method is a practical tool when you are exploring and processing new knowledge. It is not limited to new topics and content from lectures in your studies. You can apply it to any new knowledge and topic you’d like to better and fully understand. It consists of the following steps:

1. Take a blank sheet of paper and a pen
   • … or create a new document with the text editor of your choice. Imagine that you would have to explain a specific topic to someone who absolutely knows nothing about it.
2. Set an appropriate title
   • Carefully think about a title for your document. It should exactly describe the topic you’d like to write about. This is an important step, as you really have to think about what you actually want to write about. The title already directs the content of your document.
3. Start to write about the topic and track your knowledge gaps
   • Start to write the actual text by describing the topic – in your own words and still keeping in mind to explain the topic to someone who absolutely knows nothing about it.
   • While writing, you may notice gaps in your knowledge. Keep track of them and write them down on a separate sheet of paper.
4. Research and fill out all knowledge gaps
   • After finishing the first draft, look up all tracked knowledge gaps. Try to answer them as short and precise as possible and add your answers to your text.
   • The research of knowledge gaps could even lead to writing documents on other topics as well.
5. Review and further simplify
   • Review your text. If it still sounds too complicated, try to further simplify it. The review process can involve multiple iterations. Still imagine you would explain it to someone who knows nothing about the topic. When you are fully satisfied, you’re done.
   • You could set up a filing system in which you collect all your research documents.
   • You could also discuss it with someone else, present it, add it to your thesis or an article, or you post it on your blog.

In a strongly condensed form, the core of the Feynman method can therefore be expressed in three steps:

1. Write down the problem.
2. Think very hard.
3. Write down the solution.

Sometimes, these three steps are presented as the Feynman method itself. In the stricter sense, however, they are not a separate method, but the condensed core contained in the five steps described above.

Background

Richard P. Feynmanꜛ (1918–1988) was an American theoretical physicist and one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century. He made fundamental contributions to quantum electrodynamics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 together with Julian Schwinger and Shin’ichirō Tomonaga. Beyond his scientific work, Feynman became widely known for his unusual clarity in explaining difficult concepts, his lectures on physics, and his insistence that real understanding means being able to reconstruct an idea from its foundations rather than merely repeat learned formulas or terminology.

Feynman (center) with Robert Oppenheimer (immediately right of Feynman) at a Los Alamos Laboratory social function during the Manhattan Project, between 1943 and 1946. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: public domain).

Richard Feynman found that learning should not be about remembering difficult topics. It should rather be about making things easier and really understanding them. If you just try to remember knowledge, you can indeed pass your exams by just repeating the keywords, basic facts, theories and concepts – but you’d never really understand what they are about, how a certain topic is constituted, how it could be related to other topics and how to transfer and apply the knowledge to a new problem. Processing knowledge by the Feynman method will help you to really understand topics. The biographer James Gleick wrote about Feynman on this point:

[He] opened a fresh notebook. On the title page he wrote “Notebook of things I don’t know about”. … He worked for weeks at disassembling each branch of physics, oiling the parts, and putting them back together, looking all the while for the raw edges and inconsistencies. He tried to find the essential kernels of each subject.

– James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Pantheon, 1992

When Feynman came across a publication or something that interested him, he wanted to understand it. If the subject matter contained, e.g., some mathematical technique he did not know, he worked on it until he had learned it. This is also why the Feynman method is not only a learning technique, but also a problem-solving technique. It does not separate understanding from formulation. Writing down what a problem is, what is already known, what is still unclear, and what a possible solution would have to explain is already part of the actual intellectual work.

I believe that by applying this method of learning, we not only learn the underlying subject, but also become better able to reproduce it in our own words. This can later help us solve our own problems and create new knowledge based on gathered and deepened understanding.

Paul Dirac and Richard Feynman at Jabłonna, Poland. July 1962. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: CC BY-SA 4.0).

Cornell Notes and the 5 Rs

Related to the Feynman method is another common technique for taking and processing notes, often called the Cornell methodꜛ. It is structured around five steps, the so-called “5 Rs”:

1. Record
   • Record all meaningful facts and ideas during the lecture.
2. Reduce
   • After the lecture and as soon as possible, summarize these facts and ideas. Doing this clarifies meaning and relationships, reinforces continuity and strengthens your memory.
3. Recite
   • Recite the notes in your own words.
4. Reflect
   • Draw out opinions from your notes and use them as a starting point for your own reflection on the course and how it relates to other courses.
5. Review
   • Spend a set amount of time every week for a review of your notes. This will help you to retain most of what you have learned.

These steps can be conveniently organized in the so-called Cornell Note template, which arranges notes, cues, and summaries on a single sheet of paper:

Cornell Notes template. (Sourceꜛ)

A practical guide for this method can be found hereꜛ (University of St. Thomas Academic Support Center) or in Chapter 10 of Walter Pauk and Ross J.Q. Owens, How to Study in College, 2010, Wadsworth Publishing, ISBN 10: 1439084467.

Pólya’s problem-solving technique (update May 2026)

After re-sharing this post on Mastodon in May 2026ꜛ, @teledynꜛ kindly pointed meꜛ to a useful addition to Feynman’s method. He referred to a related idea by George Pólya: If the original problem cannot be solved directly, one can ask which related problem, or which simplified version of the original problem, can be solved instead, and whether solving that smaller problem teaches anything about the original one.

I think this complements the Feynman method very well. It adds a practical next step for moments in which we are stuck: “This is not solvable right now. Can we reduce the problem to a simpler one and solve that instead? And if so, does solving the simpler problem give us any insight into the original one?” This keeps us moving forward without becoming discouraged. I really like that.

George Pólya

George Pólya (1887–1985) was a Hungarian-American mathematician who made important contributions to analysis, probability theory, combinatorics, geometry, and mathematical education. He taught at ETH Zurich and later at Stanford University, and became widely known for his work on heuristic reasoning in mathematics. His most influential book in this context is How to Solve It (1945), a concise study of how mathematical problems can be approached, analyzed, and solved. Pólya later developed related ideas in Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning (1954), where he examined the role of induction, analogy, and informed guessing in mathematical discovery.

Left: George Pólya (1887–1985), Hungarian-American mathematician; date: before 1935. Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: public domain). – Right: Cover of Pólya’s book How to Solve It (1st edition, 1945). Source: Wikimedia Commonsꜛ (license: low-res book cover under fair use under the copyright law of the United States; read more about non-free content usage hereꜛ).