[tzs]

Richard Feynman spent some time working at Thinking Machines, working on the router for the Connection Machine. From Danny Hillis' account of this [1]:

    By the end of that summer of 1983, Richard had
    completed his analysis of the behavior of the
    router, and much to our surprise and amusement, he
    presented his answer in the form of a set of partial
    differential equations. To a physicist this may seem
    natural, but to a computer designer, treating a set
    of boolean circuits as a continuous, differentiable
    system is a bit strange. Feynman's router equations
    were in terms of variables representing continuous
    quantities such as "the average number of 1 bits in
    a message address." I was much more accustomed to
    seeing analysis in terms of inductive proof and case
    analysis than taking the derivative of "the number
    of 1's" with respect to time. Our discrete analysis
    said we needed seven buffers per chip; Feynman's
    equations suggested that we only needed five. We
    decided to play it safe and ignore Feynman.

    The decision to ignore Feynman's analysis was made
    in September, but by next spring we were up against
    a wall. The chips that we had designed were slightly
    too big to manufacture and the only way to solve the
    problem was to cut the number of buffers per chip
    back to five. Since Feynman's equations claimed we
    could do this safely, his unconventional methods of
    analysis started looking better and better to us. We
    decided to go ahead and make the chips with the
    smaller number of buffers.

    Fortunately, he was right. When we put together the
    chips the machine worked.

[1] http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...