I've talked with two people who had worked in Rickover's organization, both of whom respected him greatly, They each had a story to tell. One had an interview with Rickover as part of his hiring process. Rickover asked him to define and evaluate an integral for a conic section, to find the volume of a cone. Another worked in Rickover's offices long enough to discover that Rickover deliberately kept a chair in his office that had one leg slightly shorter than the others, so visitors who sat in it would feel deliberately off-balance. As I see it, he was always testing people to see what was in them, as part of his drive to build an organization that did great things.