alt Hacker NewsThe Legend of von Neumann (1973) [pdf]
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When you look at it holistically, von Neumann was more influential in science and mathematics in the 20th century than either Einstein or Planck. He wasn't as obvious a symbol of the scientific revolution, but his contributions to SO MANY THINGS at a fundamental level makes him stand out to me.
For a longer read, I can highly recommend the book "The Man from the Future" by Ananyo Bhattacharya. It's quite an easy read and extensively discusses the life and discoveries by John von Neumann in chronological order.
Not sure what just happened but like 10 comments just vanished. Anyway, here's a wiki link to "The Martians" which was a group of Hungarian scientists and Von Neuman was a member.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)
"The Martians" (Hungarian: "A marslakók") were a group of prominent scientists (mostly, but not exclusively, physicists and mathematicians) of Hungarian Jewish descent who emigrated from Europe to the United States in the early half of the 20th century.[1]
Leo Szilard jokingly suggested that Hungary was a front for aliens from Mars."
Related. Others?
The legend of John von Neumann (1973) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8212335 - Aug 2014 (65 comments)
The Legend of John von Neumann - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1427906 - June 2010 (4 comments)
(Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers)
Von Nuemann is one of those names that when ever it comes up I sarcastically mentally note "John f***ing Neumann, AGAIN!". It's happened so many times in my studies that I think he might be the most important scientist to have ever lived.
He's also the inspiration for one of favorite characters in fiction, Sherkaner Underhill from A Deepness In The Sky*. :)
Recently I enjoyed very much The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut:
I occasionally wonder... who is the von Neumann of today. Where are they? What are they working on? Are they being given everything they might need to focus on their work? How can we find them? What signal are we looking for?
My favorite dude. Imagine one of the world's smartest people almost continually killing himself because he can't stop reading while driving.
Feels appropriate to mention here recent HN mentions about who deserves credit for 'von Neumann architecture"
Apparently he liked to play German marching bands at top volume while he worked in his office at the Institute for Advanced Studies, which greatly annoyed his neighbor Einstein.
highly recommend reading: Turings Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson[0]
it covers von Nuemann’s time developing the IAS machine at Princeton.
[0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/44425/turings-cathe...
The end of life section is a bit whitewashed. Freeman Dyson had an article (struggling to find it) about how von Neumann was invited to give a Hilbert-style lecture on the 10 problems for the new computing age. All the big names at the time were there, but von Neumann was in such poor shape (dementia I assume), that it was decided to pretend it had never happened.
edit: article is called Birds and Frogs, by Freeman Dyson https://wucj.lab.westlake.edu.cn/Others/Dyson_Birds_and_Frog...
To whoever speaks German or can stand auto subtitles:
Anyone interested in von Newmann should read The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut
This seems relevant to the current debate on the role of AI in mathematics:
What made von Neumann great? Was it the extraordinary rapidity with which he could understand and think and the unusual memory that retained everything he had once thought through? No. These qualities, however impressive they might have been, are ephemeral; they will have no more effect on the mathematics and the mathematicians of the future than the prowess of an athlete of a hundred years ago has on the sport of today.
"The duties of John von Neumann's assistant" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16411799
I don't know what ww4 will be fought with... But ww3 will be fought With mat4x4<f32> And 2.4 GHz
Authored by Paul Halmos. He wrote Finite-Dimensional Vector Spaces, which was assigned textbook for my Linear Algebra course. A humbling read for me, coming from calc 3 and thinking I was hot shit. Stripped me of any illusions of becoming a mathematician.
von Neumann is one of the very very few people that I struggle to place in any single template. From all the facts already present in the pdf and elsewhere, it does become immediately obvious that he had both superhuman memory and an extremely fast processor (although it is unclear if his brain followed a von Neumann architecture).
My template had guessed,
"sounds like someone who enjoyed working in quiet spaces" -> Nope, he liked loud environments to get his brain going (apparently Einstein once complained about Neumann being noisy)
"he would have been a focused person" -> Nope, he never worked on anything for too long
"unlikely to be motivated by money" -> Nope, he famously “loved money” according to Wigner [1]
"probably not someone who stares at women" -> nope, at Los Alamos, secretaries sometimes put cardboard across the open fronts of their desks because otherwise Neumann would stare
Tl;Dr: I find him fascinating.
[1]: interestingly, there was a group of Jewish Hungarian scientists - von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, and Theodore von Karman - all brilliant, all born within one-mile-radius circle in downtown Budapest, all emigrated to the US, collectively known as Martians by their colleagues.
Shouldve bee the man instea dof chuck norris
I remember reading about how he was also a pioneer in using early supercomputers to predict weather patterns in meteorology. I never thought to combine supercomputers and weather before.
Hungarian high school science fair projects...
for a chance to experience his mind, I recommend his book: "The computer and the brain".
OT: I found this style of writing extremely clear and readable. I wonder what is different about this author’s writing. There is zero pretension and just exists to impart information. But if that’s the case why do I hate the writing in Wikipedia?
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He was good for the time, but Jane Street and Anthropic have hundreds of equivalent intellects working for them.
My favorite von Neumann anecdote was a quote from Edward Teller: "von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3 year old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us."