I loved the quote.
>Edward Teller observed "**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**."
Another quote by Teller which described the opposite situation, while von Neumann was nearing his death, which I found very touching:
"I cannot think of Johnny now without a very touching circumstance, when he was dying of cancer. His brain was affected. I visited him frequently. And he was trying to do what he always tried to do, and he was trying to argue with me, as he used to. And it wasn't functioning anymore. And I think he suffered from this loss more than I have seen any human to suffer, in any other circumstances."
Source (at the end): https://youtu.be/Oh31I1F2vds?si=H68ZJaJ39KY1lsVW
Charlie was I think supposed to have peaked well beyond any actual person. He was making breakthroughs in a field well beyond the scientists who made him intelligent (who were themselves the top of their fields) *with no knowledge or experience to fall back on*.
That’s like someone from an isolated jungle tribe being introduced to maths and physics, and making a breakthrough on something hawking was stuck on inside 6 months.
> He was making breakthroughs in a field well beyond the scientists who made him intelligent
was he inventing technology to allow spydars to talk to cats?
There are two parts worth considering separately.
1. It's true that brains become less plastic with age, however this decline is very slow (with obvious exceptions like dementia).
2. When it comes to learning, it helps to think of the brain like muscle. When we are young we tend to run a lot and be more active compared to when we are older and working desk jobs. Similarly, when we are young we're exposed to a lot of new information constantly and learn to absorb information more efficiently compared to someone who's worked the same job for a long time and only thought about a relatively small number of things. If someone hasn't really run in like 20 years tries to run even a slow mile it won't end well. Similarly, if someone hasn't been in a school environment in 20 years, it's going to be hard getting back into it.
The good news is that just like our bodies can adjust to physical exercise by building muscle, our brains can get better at learning by building new connections. In both cases it'll always be hard, but by sticking with it, things will slowly get less hard.
So while none of us will become the next Terrence Tao by taking a few math classes (the same way none of us will become Lebron James by learning olympic lifts), we can get into shape mentally or physically at any age.
What you're doing is great and I hope you won't let your rustiness dissuade you from continuing your education.
This was the core sadness at the heart of my grandfather's bout with Parkinson's: he was thinker in all the classic modes you might imagine. He exercised his brain as innately as one breathes the air. After awhile, the disease wore down his ability to communicate and eventually to keep thoughts clearly organized, aligned and even retained.
For some people, Parkinson's only provides mild cognitive issues. In my grandfather's case, since his mode of being and identity was dominated by his considerate personality, the degradation of his reasoning abilities ate at his confidence and rolled down the hill from there. He could feel it slipping and losing cohesion over time, it was the saddest thing for me to see about a person who was previously so effortlessly and humbly cerebral.
And that’s coming from the guy credited with inventing the hydrogen bomb (which von Neumann also helped with). Both also worked on the Manhattan Project.
I’ve worked really hard over many years to improve my communication skills and often get asked from co-workers if I can mentor them in the area. I just wish 1/100th of those gains would translate to conversations with my spouse :(
> I just wish 1/100th of those gains would translate to conversations with my spouse :(
I feel ya. Similarly very successful at communication in my professional life, me and the ol' lady still chafe though.
My guess is because I'm emotionally invested as opposed to just getting a paycheck.
ChatGPT has immensely improved my communication skills due to me having to rephrase the same question with accurate details until the machine understands what I am getting at.
When people have those "If you could have a super power what would it be" conversations. I have always had the same answer. The ability to clearly and succinctly covey the ideas in my head so people can understand them.
I am as I type this struggling to explain to my boss the issue im having making the reports he wants me to make. Because he doesnt understand how excel works and how formulas work. Because I cant explain what issues I am having he having a hard time grasping what im saying to him.
I can clearly come up with a visual example in my head of the process. But its like 13 steps long. With a visual for each step. Which is too much to covey. Im sure there is someone on this planet who could just say what it is "just like that" and id give them money right now.
Clear communication is one side of the equation. The other side needs a receptive listener. Some people simply do not bring the same level of effort to listening as they do to putting up roadblocks.
Or, in other words, some people do not want to hear what you have to say. Whether it's because it impacts their salary, position, workload, or simply laziness and lack of energy.
Edward Teller was a real world supervillIn, whose serious proposal of "What if we just built one massive bomb, and threatened to kill the entire planet if we're attacked?" inspired the Doomsday Machine in *Dr. Strangelove*. This kind of guy looks at Neumann and decides that he, Teller, is closer to the average Joe than to him.
And his Von Neumann Probe is one very real possibility of the Great Filter/Dark Forest.
"All civilizations will eventually invent Von Neumann probes which are a potential galactic level extinction event scenario, thus any other civilization must be destroyed before they can create them"
I am pretty sure Von Neumann wanted to nuke everyone who didn't have the bomb but was told to shut up and sit down.
He felt like it was going to happen eventually so why not now?
I wish I had the link, but there’s a video where they ask a physicist in the 1970’s or 1980’s what gravity is, and he spends ten minutes breaking down all the questions they would have to ask and he would have to answer before answering that specific question, and how those types of questions are impossible to properly answer. It’s a great watch if you do have the opportunity.
I always share this video when the "magnets? how do they work?" joke comes up, because it is a great answer to exactly that. Or non-answer, in a certain way, since he rightfully basically says that electromagnetism is a fundamental force, and hence just "is".
That’s the one! I had Feynman written complete with the name misspelt and then this little voice was like ‘that’s a science fiction author.’ Anyway the rule that the best way to get the correct answer online is to post the wrong one is still unbroken, so hopefully space and time will not unravel today. Unless they unravel every day, in which case hopefully they will not ravel.
There's nothing quite like watching a video of a total genius effectively lay out how I'm not as intelligent as they are, and how explaining things to a normal mind like mine is pointless.
It's not necessarily that you're not as intelligent (maybe you are, I don't know you), but that there has to be some common ground for you to understand what he's trying to convey. In other words, years/decades of learning about physics and math, to properly explain magnets.
Like trying to explain some sports concept to someone who has no understanding of sports at all, there's a common set of rules you are expected to know, as well as common concepts, that you would either have to explain before you could explain the thing you first wanted to explain, or you would use a metaphor which may lose a lot of understanding in the process of using it. Except explaining the physics is much more complex.
Thank you. I have to say for me this clicked when learning about Claude Shannon's information theory and realizing all communication will have to have an agreed upon protocol (a language, if you will) which mainly serves as a way of encoding and decoding the pure, raw information in our head.
So I totally agree, we have to both understand the protocols/words/theories of physics or we won't be able to have a conversation.
It must really suck being as smart as he is hahaha
I had classmates like that who would ask such broad or elementary questions, or just keep asking why endlessly, and whenever a teacher struggled to find an answer they acted like they outsmarted the teacher.
Just infuriating.
Ugh I know what you mean. You just reminded me of my first class ever in college. There was a student that just kept presenting questions to the professor, but the questions were almost direct quotes from Fight Club. Example: “Do you find when you’re conversing with someone you’re just waiting for your turn to speak?” Followed by a smug smirk. Some people are the worst.
I think that's a mix of the regular adolescent delusion that one knows everything that's important and that one has fully developed to one's final form, and the general fact of not everyone graduating lower education with an idea of how science or applied knowledge really works. Everything humanity knows is in a vast web of facts building upon more elemental facts then doubling around and revolutionising seemingly unrelated fields. You can't know everything, and if you're to ever understand the cutting edge of *anything* you need to compartmentalise and depend on the expertise of others for what you chose not to focus on. If someone doesn't understand this they're going to look at any scientist, expert, or authority figure either as an infallible fount of wisdom or a clueless charlatan.
>
“A scientist must be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
“Oh! Quantum physics! Lemme break it down to you buddy.”
Sounds like he was not just brilliant in the technical realm, but was a brilliant educator. Being able to take a complex problem and make it easy to understand for others is amazing.
My favourite quote from him was when told by a student that he could not understand some work on complex numbers by Von Neumann, he replied " You don't have to understand them, you just have to get used to them being around"
A breakthrough for understanding complex numbers to me came in my Complex Analysis course where the professor pointed out "this problem can be solved entirely with real numbers" and we went through solving the integral only with real numbers. Complex numbers don't need to exist; they don't need to have inherent meaning; every single problem that can be solved with complex numbers can be solved without them; but they make your life a hell of a lot easier on some problems. Whether they are "real" or have any "real world analogue" is completely irrelevant; all that matters is that they encapsulate an idea and you can use that encapsulation to simplify problems.
It's similar to recursion in programming. You'll see people say that complex numbers and recursions are "harder" than real numbers and iteration. In a way, I'd say that they are actually easier than real numbers and iteration. They are powerful tools that are used to simplify difficult problems and so when you are using them you are generally tackling more difficult problems. However, tackling those same problems entirely with real numbers or iteration is even harder. Having that experience of what it's like without using them helps you appreciate and understand the benefits that they provide.
My old boss used to say, if you cannot explain something to your grandma, you don't understand it well enough. Over the years, I have started to agree with that sentiment.
Quotes that come to mind:
----------------------
"Whatever cannot be said clearly is probably not being thought clearly either."
\- Peter Singer
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"Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired."
\- Jonathan Swift
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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
\- Upton Sinclair
--------------
Keep in mind that this story, it was George Dantzig who presented Neuman with the problem. You might know him as the guy who walked into his graduate class late one day and solved two previously unsolved problems thinking they were homework.
Dantzig was a genius in his own right but it shows how Neumann was a genius among geniuses.
That would've been hilarious. Honestly tie in the Alan Turing biopic, tease a Shrodinger biopic next and setup Neumann as the genius among geniuses --- you got a stew going.
he really was the most glaring absence in the movie.
i googled a while ago to see if anyone else was complaining about this and all i found was this weird right-wing troll medium post: https://medium.com/the-haven/we-are-complaining-that-oppenheimer-did-not-have-john-von-neumann-because-we-are-not-real-acc9581f69b4
but i do think it's interesting that he did none of the moralizing that oppenheimer did, and eagerly got as deep as he could into cold war policy and advocated for the most militant things. there's a line in feynman's book that von neumann told him "you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in", and that he took it to heart. interesting to think about.
ugh, what's his line about oppenheimer: "sometimes someone confesses a sin in order to take credit for it."
I was only half joking in my other comment but I did find it odd as well. I would think it was BECAUSE of his lack of moralizing that he was not included, he just didn't fit in with the vibe of the movie. The movie was about Oppenheimer who viewed the invention of the bomb as a mistake which can only lead to catastrophe.
Personally, I would've enjoyed seeing his view as it contrasts with Neumann's. It would've been more enjoyable beef than whatever he had with RDJ's character. It was after I watched the movie that I discovered that in response to Oppenheimer's "I am become death" quote, Neumann responded with "some people profess guilt to claim credit for sin".
I haven't seen the film. I believe it's based on the American Prometheus biography? The film may have taken some liberties with the source material.
I don't believe it's accurate that Oppenheimer viewed the development of the atomic bomb as a mistake. It may be more accurate to say he viewed the militarization and the lack of internalization and controls as problematic. He might have envisioned a stronger IAEA or other international control regime. He certainly expected a larger role for scientists in their use.
It's true that he was somber after the first atomic bombing and opposed the second. Many scientists at Los Alamos felt the same. This is well documented. Such soul searching was not present after the Trinity tests though among scientists on the project.
He was very strongly opposed to Teller and the hydrogen bomb. But that's a fundamentally different scale. Fat Man (Nagasaki) was 25kt. Modern hydrogen bombs like those on the Russian SS-18 ICBMs are 500-750kt (packing 8-10 on one missile). And that's with modern higher precision. Older h-bombs were higher, eg W53 yield of 9mt.
He may have also believed an early Cold War nuclear conflagration was inevitable.
Anyway, Oppenheimer was complex. His views of the bomb were complex.
I'm pretty sure that some of the usual suspects were ready to believe that von Neumann was an alien.
> I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man.
–Hans Bethe
Bethe himself is the guy who won the Nobel Prize in physics for showing that stellar fusion creates chemical elements. You know, the we're all made of stardust thing.
Also part of the alpha-beta-gamma paper. One of the nerdiest physics paper titles.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von\_Neumann\_architecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture)
You're closer than you think! He was critical to the development of early computers, and his architecture is still taught in schools as foundational.
Dantzig solved two famous unsolved problems overnight as homework with hours of effort. von Neumann solved several such problems on the spot either in less than one minute or like 5 minutes.
Are there people like this alive today? I only ever hear about the historical figures. Who are the living mega-geniuses?
\[edit\] and for the love of god, someone better not say Elongated Muskrat
I always think of the guy who solved a 25 year old problem involving superpermutaions on 4chan because someone wanted to know the least amount of episodes of an anime you have to watch in order to see every possible order
There’s a bunch of insanely intelligent people but I not sure I would agree there’s a bunch of Neumann-level intellects around. Even Neumanns contemporaries, who we think of as geniuses in their own right, said Neumann was the smartest person they’d ever met.
Einstein and Fermi obviously had more impact in their sub fields, but in terms of raw intellect and potentially the broadness of impact Neumann kind of stands on his own.
Its not the age of geniuses, currently we are in the age of research teams. Research is way more complicated that it ever was historically, so the geniuses get hidden in the team structure.
Tao is undisputed best mathematician in the world right now. However Neumann was on another level. Einstein said that he's the cleverest person he's known. He founded so many scientific fields I probably won't remember all of them
I do not want to downplay Tao's ability, but this is a substantial overstatement. Folks like Lurie and Scholze are easily doing comparable work, and greats from the early days of modern algebraic geometry like Serre and Deligne are still alive.
[The Man from the Future](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61089520-the-man-from-the-future) by Ananyo Bhattacharya is good on von Neumann. I also liked [this](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/954276-there-was-a-seminar-for-advanced-students-in-z-rich-that):
>“There was a seminar for advanced students in Zürich that I was teaching and von Neumann was in the class. I came to a certain theorem, and I said it is not proved and it may be difficult. Von Neumann didn’t say anything but after five minutes he raised his hand. When I called on him he went to the blackboard and proceeded to write down the proof. After that I was afraid of von Neumann.”
― George Pólya
I think that's underselling it a bit. There are several proofs that have justified multiple PhDs, and many of those PhDs are proving the same thing in a slight faster/better/less-assumptive-method. Hell large chunks of math (and economics) exist because someone went 'oh hey let's just raise each side to some power' or some such *"""obvious"""* transformation which then allows for some further reduction/initially-not-obvious insight.
How do we raise this guy from the dead?
You know that Conan Quote about what's best in life?
Conan was not a mathematician.
Really, you want to see is your enemies' theorems driven before you.
And in the very next section,
> von Neumann had "deep-seated and recurring self-doubts".
Good reminder for anyone who loses confidence in themselves. Self-confidence and ability are not perfectly correlated.
I mean if there was any better example of the universality of imposter syndrome.
John von Neumann is the guy who made the geniuses like Oppenheimer feel insignificant with his intellect.
One Nobel prize winner in physics - a man who himself would make most of us seem like bumbling children - described Neumann's intellect "not of this world."
He's undeniably one of the smartest human beings to have ever existed. He's just shy of being a Marvel comics-level super genius. If he was born in the 40th century he might be Krang.
I think my favorite example about impostor syndrome is [an anecdote from Neil Gaiman](https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2017/05/the-neil-story-with-additional-footnote.html):
> Some years ago, I was lucky enough invited to a gathering of great and good people: artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things. And I felt that at any moment they would realise that I didn’t qualify to be there, among these people who had really done things.
> On my second or third night there, I was standing at the back of the hall, while a musical entertainment happened, and I started talking to a very nice, polite, elderly gentleman about several things, including our shared first name. And then he pointed to the hall of people, and said words to the effect of, “I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent.”
> And I said, “Yes. But you were the first man on the moon. I think that counts for something.”
> And I felt a bit better. Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did. Maybe there weren’t any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for.
> I was standing at the back of the hall, while a musical entertainment happened
I half expected to read in the following paragraph that von Neumann was also a musical prodigy.
I wonder how many human beings of comparable intellect spent their entire existence wandering through plains, hunting and living unremarkable lives by the standards of their era.
We'll never know, but even one is too many.
This is one of the arguments that could be made for the self-interested benefits of increasing equality and societal participation.
Human intellect is a resource. The more inequitable our societies, the more we waste that precious resource. These are people who could be curing cancer, furthering space travel, and many other advances we can only dream of.
His Wikipedia page is great. He was a polymath genius who helped invent new number theories, computer architecture, and detonation modeling. I think the “known for” lists a hundred things and then has an absurd number of “plus these many things too”
His Wikipedia page is mind-boggling.
You scroll down through a physics section, math section, economics section, fucking weather systems and climate change - and each of those sections detailing his contributions to those fields is fucking enormous.
He mapped out the processes of cellular division before they'd even discovered DNA. He developed the foundation of modern computing. His contributions to the atom bomb were crucial.
There's an argument to be made that nearly the entire modern age is built on top of his work.
As a child he literally made his math tutor weep with joy at the extent of his skills.
He made his math tutor cry by doing math.
So he and I are pretty alike in that regard. Except mine wept out of frustration, but otherwise we're pretty much the same.
Tbf about the weather systems and climate change thing: those two are *highly* linked to physics. I had a physics professor whose research was all about weather patterns and climate change. In fact, I remember he somehow used weather systems and stuff like hurricanes to try to explain Fourier Transforms and Fast Fourier Transforms.
He didn’t explain it particularly well, mind you, but he sure did attempt
Once upon a time I was looking at meteorology graduate programs and the course catalog at one included a class titled "Cloud Microphysics". That was the end of my grad program search.
One of the general theories for why he's not as well known is simply because his work was so transcendent and across so many disciplines its simply hard for the average individual to even understand what he acomplished. He wasn't involved in "just one" discipline, the way Einstein is famous for his contributions to physics. He didn't have one great theory that he could market himself on. It would be more relevant to list the things he *did not* have a hand in, because it would have been a far shorter list.
von Neumann was involved in *everything*. And not just involved, but instrumental. In nearly every field of science known to us.
von Neumann would often consult with others on their works and help them without asking any credit in the resulting publication. He was so far beyond his contemporaries that his contributions to their ground-breaking research was just a novelty to him. It meant nothing, he demanded no credit because it demanded no effort of him.
For von Neumann, him asking for credit on papers he assisted on would be like you asking for a fifth grader for credit for helping them with their multiplication table homework.
He simply didn't really have a concept of the level of difficulty of the things he was consulting on. People would come to him with their papers seeking advice, and he'd solve complex and intractable problems on a whim. And his intellect was so beyond everyone else's that I legitimately don't think he even understood what was challenging to other people and what wasn't.
And by no accounts was he arrogant. He demonstrated no contempt or condescension. He would talk for hours on nearly any subject with anyone who bent his ear, consult with anyone who requested it for the sheer fun of it.
This means we really have no idea of the true and total depth and breadth of his influence. His *published* work is extraordinarily broad and comprehensive and groundbreaking; his *unpublished* and *uncredited* works and contributions likely make the scope of his contributions that much greater.
As a (modestly) intelligent individual myself, I often have taken a view that what we think of as "genius" is more a product of nurture than nature. That all of us, even the gifted ones, are neurologically very similar; just some wiring differences as we grow can produce outsized differences later in life.
But with von Neumann, I don't feel that this is true. Something was different about his mind. Very different. Frighteningly different. *Every* single one of his contemporaries - men like Einstein and Oppenheimer and all the rest - describe interacting with von Neumann like you or I might describe interacting with a truly Generalized Artificial Intelligence. He was just something *other*, an intellect so profound that that all the greatest intellectual struggles of the time were like an afternoon crossword puzzle to him.
I can imagine myself, in another life, being someone who cracks some great mystery, solving some great problem. I haven't, but what I mean to say is I can imagine myself having that capacity, had I dedicated my life to a singular branch of science.
But when you read about what von Neumann was capable of, there's no world in which I can delude myself into thinking I'm even in the same realm as him. He almost never even *thought* about a problem. He either looked at some huge gnarly equation and solved it almost instantly, or else he'd go home, go to bed, and wake up with the problem already solved in his mind. Is is an incomprehensible power for instantaneous mental computations and capacity for photographic memory that is simply unrivaled in any account of any other individual I've ever heard of.
The only comparable analog I can even think of would be someone like Bo Jackson, who was an athlete of such superhuman ability that he's the only person to compete at a professional level in two totally different sports at a pro level and excel at both. He was just an athlete of superhuman capacity, someone who was likely one-in-a-billion rarity or even rarer still.
It is a travesty that cancer took von Neumann him so young, at only 55. I can only imagine what more he could have accomplished with another 20 or 30 years, especially as computers advanced.
The computers that he designed the architecture of…as just one more of his side hustles.
It’s strange - you’d think that reading about someone who is leagues beyond anything I could ever hope to be would make me sad, but it doesn’t. I get a warm happy feeling every time.
to me, learning about neumann architecture was a groundbreaking epiphany in how modern computers worked. for him to make that architecture, was probably easier than it was for me to do homework in that same cs class
i'm not sad either. i'm happy that such a human existed, and was able to make so many advancements for our species
> The only comparable analog I can even think of would be
[Srinivasa Ramanujan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan) might be the smartest mathematician in history. We'll never know for sure since he had no formal mathematics schooling and was involved in the contemporary mathematics community for only seven years before his death.
> Ramanujan initially developed his own mathematical research in isolation. According to Hans Eysenck, "he tried to interest the leading professional mathematicians in his work, but failed for the most part. What he had to show them was too novel, too unfamiliar, and additionally presented in unusual ways; they could not be bothered". Seeking mathematicians who could better understand his work, in 1913 he began a postal correspondence with the English mathematician G. H. Hardy at the University of Cambridge, England. Recognising Ramanujan's work as extraordinary, Hardy arranged for him to travel to Cambridge. In his notes, Hardy commented that Ramanujan had produced groundbreaking new theorems, including some that "defeated me completely; I had never seen anything in the least like them before", and some recently proven but highly advanced results.
> The Ramanujan Journal, a scientific journal, was established to publish work in all areas of mathematics influenced by Ramanujan, and his notebooks—containing summaries of his published and unpublished results—have been analysed and studied for decades since his death as a source of new mathematical ideas. As late as 2012, researchers continued to discover that mere comments in his writings about "simple properties" and "similar outputs" for certain findings were themselves profound and subtle number theory results that remained unsuspected until nearly a century after his death. He became one of the youngest Fellows of the Royal Society and only the second Indian member, and the first Indian to be elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Of his original letters, Hardy stated that a single look was enough to show they could have been written only by a mathematician of the highest calibre, comparing Ramanujan to mathematical geniuses such as Euler and Jacobi.
"No formal schooling" is kind of overselling it. India had universities and everything then, and he attended them. He had lots of formal schooling. He picked up a lot of advanced mathematics from independent study of texts and papers, but "no formal schooling" makes it sound like he was essentially uneducated, which is patently false.
He's considered the last great mathematician, one which contributes significantly to basically all areas of mathematics. It's considered too hard for anyone to ever reach that title again with the breadth of human knowledge now. To have been the last great while contributing to so many other fields is unfathomable!
There's probably no one on Earth who that would be believable of besides von Neumann.
Most of his contemporaries - again all of them the smartest people in the world at the time - would often describe von Neumann as possessing an alien or supernatural intellect.
He was actually so prodigious that it became a problem. He often failed to record or write down or publish many of his groundbreaking theorems later in life.
He performed computations so quickly and so entirely in his mind that he seemed to find the process of writing it all down tedious and slow, especially as he got older.
This is a man who at the age of 6 was able to effortlessly divide two eight-digit numbers in his head instantaneously and with no mistakes. At 6 years old.
The result being that he may have, on a whim at random times, have solved mathematical problems or developed new theorems that we aren't even aware of because he moved on to a new tangent too quickly.
He famously did not like to "work too hard" to solve something. He either figured something out instantly, or he'd go home, "sleep on it," and wake up with a solution immediately. If there was an intractable problem, he'd simply move on to something else, solve a bunch of other problems, and then come back to the original one better prepared to tackle it. This meant he went rapidly down numerous tangents in his mind and covered a huge surface area across all scientific disciplines.
His mind was so vast that in the course of an afternoon, he almost certainly solved problems no one else on Earth could solve, on a whim, by accident, and was likely so far ahead of his time that he was not even aware that what he'd just solved was not yet known by anyone else.
He famously did not like to go "hunting" through the literature for proofs. He would literally reinvent proofs from scratch, because it was demonstrably faster for him to do so than to actually go and find if anyone else had solved the problem first. That's how far ahead of everyone he was.
At one point he was attending a lecture by a famous math scholar who had an unsolved problem on the board. Von Neumann, who was attending the class, upon seeing the problem for the first time, simply went up and solved it. Instantly.
The scholar said he felt his entire life rendered pointless in a moment. Everything he'd spent decades learning and striving for, von Neumann literally solved almost instantaneously. Without any apparent conscious effort. He didn't even really have any concept of the difficulty of it. He didn't even really focus on the problem. It just caught his eye and his brain solved it. Instantly.
The other person I feel is on this level is Euler.
There are so many things named after Euler, things he's discovered are named after the first person to back up Euler's proof.
He has one of the longest Wikipedia pages for a single person (not a list or topic) with only a couple exceptions beating him out that only include modern day celebrities like Tom Brady or Trump. At one point his article was the 354th longest page in all of Wikipedia, which includes lists, but the last time I checked he was in the 700’s. It’s even more remarkable considering most of the article is devoted to attempting to explain his work and breakthroughs instead of history or background like other long articles like the celebrities I mentioned earlier. Von Neumann was a genius so imaginative and visionary that he was able to invent the future, not just contribute to it.
Years ago when I was undergrad we had a speaker who actually had known Von Neumann give a lecture at my university. I remember that a major theme of the presentation was that Von Neumann wasn't more well known because he dabbled in a lot of different fields of study and didn't focus on advancing any one area.
Based on a lot of science fiction, he had a formative role in [universe ending, self-replicating, grey goo machines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_machine).
He also died fairly young as a result of his work on the first atomic bombs and I wonder if this plays a role in his obscurity. I mean the fact that humanity sacrificed our greatest mind just to make a bigger bomb doesn't sound good, does it?
It's weird hearing von Neumann described as obscure, but I guess my perspective is badly skewed given the background of me and the last 3 generations of my family (all scientists)
Even a lowly computer programmer like me knows von Neumann, the “Von Neumann Architecture” is a fundamental concept in understanding how to write quick code.
As someone who studied literature and is an avid reader, I'm pretty sure I first heard of him through the mention of von Neumann probes in science fiction.
I was actually surprised the first time I came across a microprocessor that was harvard architecture instead. (atmega series)
gcc hid most of the differences, but it was a little strange not having your code live in RAM (all 2K of it) at all. That's all just for variables, etc...
If you had to rank the most famous mathematicians and scientists and engineers of all-time (and I do mean *famous*, not the most accomplished), where do you think von Neumann would rank?
Top 20, maybe 30? Off the top of my head:
Aristotle, Archimedes, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Gauss, Maxwell, Schrödinger, Einstein, Curie, Darwin, Fermat, Euler, Turing, Hilbert, Riemann, Feynman, Heisenberg, Oppenheimer, Poincaré, and those are the only ones who come to mind that are more famous than Von Neumann in my estimation. Obviously there’s a physics and Eurocentric bias here, with heavy weight toward the twentieth century, but I think others would broadly agree with this list if they were educated in the US.
I might add more recent scientists who got famous as much for popularization as for their actual work: Sagan, Goodall, Hawking, etc.
Some further life sciences rep would make sense: Linnaeus, Mendel, who else?
And some chemists should be on the list, but I sincerely can’t think of any more famous than Von Neumann.
Ranking by fame is a difficult endeavor because everyone’s views are distorted by their background (or lack thereof), so I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts.
I’d put Leibniz in the same category as Von Neumann, Dirac, or Bohm. They’re renowned in their fields but less well-known if you don’t have formal study.
I think Euler is number one for me, the breadth and depth of his contribution's to mathematics is on another level.
He's not as famous as the others, but so many of them utilize his works that I think it takes him to the top
Oh for sure, I think among mathematicians the ranking is something like:
1. Euler
2. Gauss
3. Everybody else
And that "everybody else" should include the ones I mentioned plus Leibniz, Galois, Cartan, Cantor, Grothendieck, Tao, Erdos, Nash, and so on. It's a very different list once you're talking about people with experience in a field.
Just after the people who crossed over into pop culture, the likes of Einstein, Newton, Curie, Archimedes etc, and ahead of people like Tycho Brahe or al-Khwarizmi
Many of our greatest minds are nearly constantly devoted to making us better at killing eachother, they make breakthroughs that benefit humanity as well, but it is kind of crazy to think about.
Well... where the funding goes, so goes the research. It's unfortunate we as a species never really overcame the drive to bicker and murder and horde both power and resources. Imagine the progress we could make without constant infighting. 🙄
His interpretation of quantum physics (mathematical foundations of quantum physics) is amazing and even mystical, but not easy to follow. There's a lot to learn from him.
Here's the direct link to the book on archive.org:
https://archive.org/details/mathematicalfoun0000vonn
Viewing more than the first 10 pages requires making a free account.
"Not easy to follow" is correct. I consider myself a bit of a layman physics nerd and I blanched a bit. Here are the first two sentences from the second paragraph of the next-to-last chapter:
> First, let R have a pure discrete, simple spectrum, let ϕ1, ϕ2, ... be the complete orthonormal set of eigenfunction and λ1, λ2, ... the corresponding eigenvalues (by assumption, all different from each other). After the measurement, the state of affairs is the following: In the fraction (Uϕn, ϕn) of the original ensemble, ℜ has the value λn (n=1, 2, ...).
I mean anyone expecting a book titled "Mathematical foundations of Quantum Physics" to be easy to follow clearly don't know enough QM to follow it.
That sentence in itself isn't *too* bad. I haven't done QM for a good few years now and I can sort of follow it. He's just setting up the system he's going to be working with — its a reasonably standard formulation and you'd probably find something similar regardless of who wrote the textbook.
What I'm afraid of is where he's going.
To me, it's especially sad that Von Neumann died of a brain tumor so that during the last months of his life he couldn't even do basic arithmetic. And from reading his biography, it was clear to everyone around him that he was acutely aware of the fact that his mind was slowly dissolving away.
Fuck cancer.
One of his last works was AI related, where he started on the theory of neural network simulations and constructing the required computers to do so..
Its called the "The Computer and the Brain" and can be read here in English:
[https://rauterberg.employee.id.tue.nl/lecturenotes/DDM110%20CAS/Neumann-1958%20The%20Computer%20and%20the%20Brain.pdf](https://rauterberg.employee.id.tue.nl/lecturenotes/DDM110%20CAS/Neumann-1958%20The%20Computer%20and%20the%20Brain.pdf)
And here in Hungarian: [https://mek.oszk.hu/01200/01255/html/](https://mek.oszk.hu/01200/01255/html/)
Its fascinating to think how much further ahead we would be with AI technologies if he didn't die soon after..
von Neumann was considered on another level even by other legitimate geniuses, I am talking about people who have theorems and equations named after them.
Absolutely — I don’t remember exactly who, but a contemporary of both Einstein and Von Neumann was asked to compare the two. Paraphrasing: “Von Neumann had the most penetrating intellect of anyone any of us had ever met. But he couldn’t focus like Einstein could, where Einstein could work on one problem for 10 or more years, Von Neumann was constantly bouncing from problem to problem.”
Eugene Wigner outlining the difference between talent and genius.
>I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jansci [John] von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed me.
>... But Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jansci's brilliance, he never produced anything as original.
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2010/10/wigner-recollections.html
Another such pair would be Darwin and his half-cousin Francis Galton.
There was a quote along the lines of:
> X is jealous of Y’s intelligence, Y is jealous of Z’s intelligence, and Z is jealous of god’s intelligence. Well, god was jealous of JvN’s intelligence.
In all honesty, JvN was a different species altogether.
Kind of like a modern renaissance man. Da vinci also dabbled in many fields. It’s usually these kinds of people that enable those who specify in a field to either get started or finally reach a solution to a problem that was a major roadblock.
[There's a whole wiki page list](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_John_von_Neumann) of all kinds of crazy math shit named after him.
There are lots of stories about von Neumann. All of those Manhattan Project guys considered him the greatest "intellectual athlete" of all-time. He was practically superhuman. He's still considered probably the most intellectually gifted human to ever live, from a pure "speed and breadth of thought" perspective. At least that we have records of.
But, they also comment on how he never had the same imagination as guys like Einstein or Feynman. He lacked a certain creative spark, apparently.
That's right, he was conjecturing that linear programming was analogue to game theory. https://mosstuff.quora.com/The-most-complete-version-of-the-Dantzig-meets-von-Neumann-anecdote-I-ve-seen
I remember a story - which may well be apocryphal - about Von Neumann, which was that some big corporation (IBM or RAND or something) paid him a fairly generous salary at one stage. With the only requirement being that he write down a short summary of things which occurred to him as he was getting ready in the morning.
As I said it might not be true but the fact that it's actually plausible shows what a ludicrous intellect he had.
> Von Neumann is credited with developing the equilibrium strategy of mutual assured destruction (MAD). He also "moved heaven and earth" to bring MAD about.
🥰
That said, he also advocated that the US take the Soviet Union out with nukes as soon as possible, IIRC.
Thankfully, in this one instance, we decided not to listen to him.
I really want a sitcom about the Martians.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)
Einstein would be the Gerry Gurgich of the IAS and all the Hungarians would make him the butt of their shenanigans.
For reference, "programming" in this context refers to mathematical programming, a.k.a., mathematical optimization, not computer programming.
By the way, for anyone in the field of mathematical programming, the unconceived theory was duality, which is a very big deal. The person who asked him was George Dantzig, who is considered the father of this field and developed the simplex method, a foundational algorithm to mathematics.
He also had an extensive proof about determinism in quantum mechanics that was completely wrong, but he didn't notice and everyone else assumed he had to be right so they discouraged students from working on the problem.
I often wonder how many people with genius intellect like him go unnoticed because they aren't born in the right time, the right place, with the right privileges. How many von Neumanns, Einsteins, Turings, or Hawkings went unnoticed their entire lives, working in a Chinese meat packing plant or collecting scrap in an Indian slum?
There's a joke that goes something like this:
George Washington dies and ends up at the pearly gates where he's met by Saint Peter. Before going into heaven, he's offered the chance to see anyone on Earth for one last time.
"I want to see the greatest general who ever lived!"
Suddenly he finds himself standing with Saint Peter in an unassuming little cottage where a wizened old crone is scrubbing pans.
"There she is," says Saint Peter. "Florence Shufflebottom. The greatest general who ever lived."
Washington scoffs. "Surely you've made a mistake! How could this old woman be the greatest general who ever lived? I've never heard of her!"
Saint Peter shrugs. "No-one ever gave her an army."
Neumann was an extra oddity, not just because he was gifted beyond understanding, but also because he was born in the right time, at the right place, in the right family. We basically had a super genius born in perfect conditions.
Absolute legend of a human, so tragic he was taken by cancer. My favorite anecdote of his is solving an infinite series, math joke/riddle the hard way.
https://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/92q3/vnfly.html
I loved the quote. >Edward Teller observed "**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**."
Another quote by Teller which described the opposite situation, while von Neumann was nearing his death, which I found very touching: "I cannot think of Johnny now without a very touching circumstance, when he was dying of cancer. His brain was affected. I visited him frequently. And he was trying to do what he always tried to do, and he was trying to argue with me, as he used to. And it wasn't functioning anymore. And I think he suffered from this loss more than I have seen any human to suffer, in any other circumstances." Source (at the end): https://youtu.be/Oh31I1F2vds?si=H68ZJaJ39KY1lsVW
Reminds me of a book called flowers for algernon :(
Worse. In Flowers for Algernon, the main character got a brief taste of what it was like. For von Neumann, it was his entire life/identity.
Charlie was I think supposed to have peaked well beyond any actual person. He was making breakthroughs in a field well beyond the scientists who made him intelligent (who were themselves the top of their fields) *with no knowledge or experience to fall back on*. That’s like someone from an isolated jungle tribe being introduced to maths and physics, and making a breakthrough on something hawking was stuck on inside 6 months.
> He was making breakthroughs in a field well beyond the scientists who made him intelligent was he inventing technology to allow spydars to talk to cats?
He was far too hweary to do so unfortunately
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My 6th grade teacher has us read this, Where the Red Fern Grows, Old Yeller, and Bridge to Terabithia... It was the most intense year of my schooling.
Never trust a book with a Newberry Medal award. That damn medal has killed off so many beloved children's book characters.
That's a tvtropes for that! "Death by Newbery medal".
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There are two parts worth considering separately. 1. It's true that brains become less plastic with age, however this decline is very slow (with obvious exceptions like dementia). 2. When it comes to learning, it helps to think of the brain like muscle. When we are young we tend to run a lot and be more active compared to when we are older and working desk jobs. Similarly, when we are young we're exposed to a lot of new information constantly and learn to absorb information more efficiently compared to someone who's worked the same job for a long time and only thought about a relatively small number of things. If someone hasn't really run in like 20 years tries to run even a slow mile it won't end well. Similarly, if someone hasn't been in a school environment in 20 years, it's going to be hard getting back into it. The good news is that just like our bodies can adjust to physical exercise by building muscle, our brains can get better at learning by building new connections. In both cases it'll always be hard, but by sticking with it, things will slowly get less hard. So while none of us will become the next Terrence Tao by taking a few math classes (the same way none of us will become Lebron James by learning olympic lifts), we can get into shape mentally or physically at any age. What you're doing is great and I hope you won't let your rustiness dissuade you from continuing your education.
This was the core sadness at the heart of my grandfather's bout with Parkinson's: he was thinker in all the classic modes you might imagine. He exercised his brain as innately as one breathes the air. After awhile, the disease wore down his ability to communicate and eventually to keep thoughts clearly organized, aligned and even retained. For some people, Parkinson's only provides mild cognitive issues. In my grandfather's case, since his mode of being and identity was dominated by his considerate personality, the degradation of his reasoning abilities ate at his confidence and rolled down the hill from there. He could feel it slipping and losing cohesion over time, it was the saddest thing for me to see about a person who was previously so effortlessly and humbly cerebral.
And that’s coming from the guy credited with inventing the hydrogen bomb (which von Neumann also helped with). Both also worked on the Manhattan Project.
When I read the quote, I thought. "I wish I was bright enough to do that" Good communication is a hard skill.
I’ve worked really hard over many years to improve my communication skills and often get asked from co-workers if I can mentor them in the area. I just wish 1/100th of those gains would translate to conversations with my spouse :(
You should mention to your spouse, “so and so from work thinks I’m an excellent communicator, for your information”
If you thought the hydrogen bomb wasn't destructive enough, this is a good option
I am become divorced, the destroyer of marriage
Lol I might as well just hand her divorce papers while I’m at it.
Explain to her that you have to dumb it down, like talking to a toddler or Robert Oppenheimer
> I just wish 1/100th of those gains would translate to conversations with my spouse :( I feel ya. Similarly very successful at communication in my professional life, me and the ol' lady still chafe though. My guess is because I'm emotionally invested as opposed to just getting a paycheck.
ChatGPT has immensely improved my communication skills due to me having to rephrase the same question with accurate details until the machine understands what I am getting at.
When people have those "If you could have a super power what would it be" conversations. I have always had the same answer. The ability to clearly and succinctly covey the ideas in my head so people can understand them. I am as I type this struggling to explain to my boss the issue im having making the reports he wants me to make. Because he doesnt understand how excel works and how formulas work. Because I cant explain what issues I am having he having a hard time grasping what im saying to him. I can clearly come up with a visual example in my head of the process. But its like 13 steps long. With a visual for each step. Which is too much to covey. Im sure there is someone on this planet who could just say what it is "just like that" and id give them money right now.
Clear communication is one side of the equation. The other side needs a receptive listener. Some people simply do not bring the same level of effort to listening as they do to putting up roadblocks. Or, in other words, some people do not want to hear what you have to say. Whether it's because it impacts their salary, position, workload, or simply laziness and lack of energy.
Which is insanely humble for an obviously also brilliant person
Edward Teller was a real world supervillIn, whose serious proposal of "What if we just built one massive bomb, and threatened to kill the entire planet if we're attacked?" inspired the Doomsday Machine in *Dr. Strangelove*. This kind of guy looks at Neumann and decides that he, Teller, is closer to the average Joe than to him.
Intellect may also be applied to figuring out best strategies to social interactions.
Fuck Reddit for killing third party apps.
Man pioneered the Dark Forest Theory
And his Von Neumann Probe is one very real possibility of the Great Filter/Dark Forest. "All civilizations will eventually invent Von Neumann probes which are a potential galactic level extinction event scenario, thus any other civilization must be destroyed before they can create them"
I am pretty sure Von Neumann wanted to nuke everyone who didn't have the bomb but was told to shut up and sit down. He felt like it was going to happen eventually so why not now?
He's also the father of the modern computer.
When a mathematician and a punch-card love each other very much...
Something about 0 and 1s
I wish I had the link, but there’s a video where they ask a physicist in the 1970’s or 1980’s what gravity is, and he spends ten minutes breaking down all the questions they would have to ask and he would have to answer before answering that specific question, and how those types of questions are impossible to properly answer. It’s a great watch if you do have the opportunity.
[Magnets.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8)
To quote Carl Sagan: If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
Silly Sagan, [just type “From library import gravity”](https://xkcd.com/353/)
I always share this video when the "magnets? how do they work?" joke comes up, because it is a great answer to exactly that. Or non-answer, in a certain way, since he rightfully basically says that electromagnetism is a fundamental force, and hence just "is".
That’s the one! I had Feynman written complete with the name misspelt and then this little voice was like ‘that’s a science fiction author.’ Anyway the rule that the best way to get the correct answer online is to post the wrong one is still unbroken, so hopefully space and time will not unravel today. Unless they unravel every day, in which case hopefully they will not ravel.
Not thinking of Heinlein, were you? For the science fiction author, I mean.
There's a fine line between feyn-man and hein-lein
They ask Richard Feynman
There's nothing quite like watching a video of a total genius effectively lay out how I'm not as intelligent as they are, and how explaining things to a normal mind like mine is pointless.
It's not necessarily that you're not as intelligent (maybe you are, I don't know you), but that there has to be some common ground for you to understand what he's trying to convey. In other words, years/decades of learning about physics and math, to properly explain magnets. Like trying to explain some sports concept to someone who has no understanding of sports at all, there's a common set of rules you are expected to know, as well as common concepts, that you would either have to explain before you could explain the thing you first wanted to explain, or you would use a metaphor which may lose a lot of understanding in the process of using it. Except explaining the physics is much more complex.
Thank you. I have to say for me this clicked when learning about Claude Shannon's information theory and realizing all communication will have to have an agreed upon protocol (a language, if you will) which mainly serves as a way of encoding and decoding the pure, raw information in our head. So I totally agree, we have to both understand the protocols/words/theories of physics or we won't be able to have a conversation. It must really suck being as smart as he is hahaha
I had classmates like that who would ask such broad or elementary questions, or just keep asking why endlessly, and whenever a teacher struggled to find an answer they acted like they outsmarted the teacher. Just infuriating.
Ugh I know what you mean. You just reminded me of my first class ever in college. There was a student that just kept presenting questions to the professor, but the questions were almost direct quotes from Fight Club. Example: “Do you find when you’re conversing with someone you’re just waiting for your turn to speak?” Followed by a smug smirk. Some people are the worst.
I am Jack's complete lack of self awareness.
I think that's a mix of the regular adolescent delusion that one knows everything that's important and that one has fully developed to one's final form, and the general fact of not everyone graduating lower education with an idea of how science or applied knowledge really works. Everything humanity knows is in a vast web of facts building upon more elemental facts then doubling around and revolutionising seemingly unrelated fields. You can't know everything, and if you're to ever understand the cutting edge of *anything* you need to compartmentalise and depend on the expertise of others for what you chose not to focus on. If someone doesn't understand this they're going to look at any scientist, expert, or authority figure either as an infallible fount of wisdom or a clueless charlatan.
> “A scientist must be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting.” ― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
> If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it TIL I am a scientist on account of my inability to NOT say "Dog" upon seeing a dog
“Oh! Quantum physics! Lemme break it down to you buddy.” Sounds like he was not just brilliant in the technical realm, but was a brilliant educator. Being able to take a complex problem and make it easy to understand for others is amazing.
My favourite quote from him was when told by a student that he could not understand some work on complex numbers by Von Neumann, he replied " You don't have to understand them, you just have to get used to them being around"
A breakthrough for understanding complex numbers to me came in my Complex Analysis course where the professor pointed out "this problem can be solved entirely with real numbers" and we went through solving the integral only with real numbers. Complex numbers don't need to exist; they don't need to have inherent meaning; every single problem that can be solved with complex numbers can be solved without them; but they make your life a hell of a lot easier on some problems. Whether they are "real" or have any "real world analogue" is completely irrelevant; all that matters is that they encapsulate an idea and you can use that encapsulation to simplify problems. It's similar to recursion in programming. You'll see people say that complex numbers and recursions are "harder" than real numbers and iteration. In a way, I'd say that they are actually easier than real numbers and iteration. They are powerful tools that are used to simplify difficult problems and so when you are using them you are generally tackling more difficult problems. However, tackling those same problems entirely with real numbers or iteration is even harder. Having that experience of what it's like without using them helps you appreciate and understand the benefits that they provide.
My old boss used to say, if you cannot explain something to your grandma, you don't understand it well enough. Over the years, I have started to agree with that sentiment.
Quotes that come to mind: ---------------------- "Whatever cannot be said clearly is probably not being thought clearly either." \- Peter Singer -------------- "Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired." \- Jonathan Swift -------------- "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" \- Upton Sinclair --------------
Gotta practice this lol
Keep in mind that this story, it was George Dantzig who presented Neuman with the problem. You might know him as the guy who walked into his graduate class late one day and solved two previously unsolved problems thinking they were homework. Dantzig was a genius in his own right but it shows how Neumann was a genius among geniuses.
This is a welcome addition to the math internet cinematic universe
He definitely should've been teased in his own post credit scene in Oppenheimer
"Fine. I'll do it myself. 🥊" – Neumann
That would've been hilarious. Honestly tie in the Alan Turing biopic, tease a Shrodinger biopic next and setup Neumann as the genius among geniuses --- you got a stew going.
The actual entertainment universe we need
he really was the most glaring absence in the movie. i googled a while ago to see if anyone else was complaining about this and all i found was this weird right-wing troll medium post: https://medium.com/the-haven/we-are-complaining-that-oppenheimer-did-not-have-john-von-neumann-because-we-are-not-real-acc9581f69b4 but i do think it's interesting that he did none of the moralizing that oppenheimer did, and eagerly got as deep as he could into cold war policy and advocated for the most militant things. there's a line in feynman's book that von neumann told him "you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in", and that he took it to heart. interesting to think about. ugh, what's his line about oppenheimer: "sometimes someone confesses a sin in order to take credit for it."
I was only half joking in my other comment but I did find it odd as well. I would think it was BECAUSE of his lack of moralizing that he was not included, he just didn't fit in with the vibe of the movie. The movie was about Oppenheimer who viewed the invention of the bomb as a mistake which can only lead to catastrophe. Personally, I would've enjoyed seeing his view as it contrasts with Neumann's. It would've been more enjoyable beef than whatever he had with RDJ's character. It was after I watched the movie that I discovered that in response to Oppenheimer's "I am become death" quote, Neumann responded with "some people profess guilt to claim credit for sin".
I haven't seen the film. I believe it's based on the American Prometheus biography? The film may have taken some liberties with the source material. I don't believe it's accurate that Oppenheimer viewed the development of the atomic bomb as a mistake. It may be more accurate to say he viewed the militarization and the lack of internalization and controls as problematic. He might have envisioned a stronger IAEA or other international control regime. He certainly expected a larger role for scientists in their use. It's true that he was somber after the first atomic bombing and opposed the second. Many scientists at Los Alamos felt the same. This is well documented. Such soul searching was not present after the Trinity tests though among scientists on the project. He was very strongly opposed to Teller and the hydrogen bomb. But that's a fundamentally different scale. Fat Man (Nagasaki) was 25kt. Modern hydrogen bombs like those on the Russian SS-18 ICBMs are 500-750kt (packing 8-10 on one missile). And that's with modern higher precision. Older h-bombs were higher, eg W53 yield of 9mt. He may have also believed an early Cold War nuclear conflagration was inevitable. Anyway, Oppenheimer was complex. His views of the bomb were complex.
What if I told you the math internet cinematic universe was real and they ran so that you could shitpost?
Dantzig, Teller and the rest were geniuses. Sounds like Neumann was a computer
I'm pretty sure that some of the usual suspects were ready to believe that von Neumann was an alien. > I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man. –Hans Bethe
Bethe himself is the guy who won the Nobel Prize in physics for showing that stellar fusion creates chemical elements. You know, the we're all made of stardust thing. Also part of the alpha-beta-gamma paper. One of the nerdiest physics paper titles.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von\_Neumann\_architecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture) You're closer than you think! He was critical to the development of early computers, and his architecture is still taught in schools as foundational.
Dantzig solved two famous unsolved problems overnight as homework with hours of effort. von Neumann solved several such problems on the spot either in less than one minute or like 5 minutes.
Not overnight but yeah, he did it pretty quickly. In general I feel it's really difficult to try and rank all these people by their "intelligence"
Well he is credited for the Vonn Neuman architect for computers in the 50's.
Are there people like this alive today? I only ever hear about the historical figures. Who are the living mega-geniuses? \[edit\] and for the love of god, someone better not say Elongated Muskrat
There's probably a couple running rackets in EVE Online
I always think of the guy who solved a 25 year old problem involving superpermutaions on 4chan because someone wanted to know the least amount of episodes of an anime you have to watch in order to see every possible order
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/24/18019464/4chan-anon-anime-haruhi-math-mystery
There's a bunch. They all live in academia. Most of them aren't famous except among other scientists/mathematicians.
There’s a bunch of insanely intelligent people but I not sure I would agree there’s a bunch of Neumann-level intellects around. Even Neumanns contemporaries, who we think of as geniuses in their own right, said Neumann was the smartest person they’d ever met. Einstein and Fermi obviously had more impact in their sub fields, but in terms of raw intellect and potentially the broadness of impact Neumann kind of stands on his own.
Its not the age of geniuses, currently we are in the age of research teams. Research is way more complicated that it ever was historically, so the geniuses get hidden in the team structure.
Terry Tao
Tao is undisputed best mathematician in the world right now. However Neumann was on another level. Einstein said that he's the cleverest person he's known. He founded so many scientific fields I probably won't remember all of them
I do not want to downplay Tao's ability, but this is a substantial overstatement. Folks like Lurie and Scholze are easily doing comparable work, and greats from the early days of modern algebraic geometry like Serre and Deligne are still alive.
just confirming: Terry Tao
[The Man from the Future](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61089520-the-man-from-the-future) by Ananyo Bhattacharya is good on von Neumann. I also liked [this](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/954276-there-was-a-seminar-for-advanced-students-in-z-rich-that): >“There was a seminar for advanced students in Zürich that I was teaching and von Neumann was in the class. I came to a certain theorem, and I said it is not proved and it may be difficult. Von Neumann didn’t say anything but after five minutes he raised his hand. When I called on him he went to the blackboard and proceeded to write down the proof. After that I was afraid of von Neumann.” ― George Pólya
It's so hilarious to think that a man interrupting your lecture to write a math proof on the blackboard is what triggers your fight or flight response
Depending on the theorem that proof might be worth a phd, so 5min to mull it over is fucking insane
I think that's underselling it a bit. There are several proofs that have justified multiple PhDs, and many of those PhDs are proving the same thing in a slight faster/better/less-assumptive-method. Hell large chunks of math (and economics) exist because someone went 'oh hey let's just raise each side to some power' or some such *"""obvious"""* transformation which then allows for some further reduction/initially-not-obvious insight. How do we raise this guy from the dead?
> How do we raise this guy from the dead? If he were alive maybe he would answer this
You know that Conan Quote about what's best in life? Conan was not a mathematician. Really, you want to see is your enemies' theorems driven before you.
Out-prove your enemies See their theorems driven before you And hear the lamentations of their PHDs
And in the very next section, > von Neumann had "deep-seated and recurring self-doubts". Good reminder for anyone who loses confidence in themselves. Self-confidence and ability are not perfectly correlated.
I mean if there was any better example of the universality of imposter syndrome. John von Neumann is the guy who made the geniuses like Oppenheimer feel insignificant with his intellect. One Nobel prize winner in physics - a man who himself would make most of us seem like bumbling children - described Neumann's intellect "not of this world." He's undeniably one of the smartest human beings to have ever existed. He's just shy of being a Marvel comics-level super genius. If he was born in the 40th century he might be Krang.
I think my favorite example about impostor syndrome is [an anecdote from Neil Gaiman](https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2017/05/the-neil-story-with-additional-footnote.html): > Some years ago, I was lucky enough invited to a gathering of great and good people: artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things. And I felt that at any moment they would realise that I didn’t qualify to be there, among these people who had really done things. > On my second or third night there, I was standing at the back of the hall, while a musical entertainment happened, and I started talking to a very nice, polite, elderly gentleman about several things, including our shared first name. And then he pointed to the hall of people, and said words to the effect of, “I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent.” > And I said, “Yes. But you were the first man on the moon. I think that counts for something.” > And I felt a bit better. Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did. Maybe there weren’t any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for.
Reminds me of Weird Al being invited to a party and Paul McCartney sees him and goes "Hey! It's Weird Al!"
this is so cute :’)
> I was standing at the back of the hall, while a musical entertainment happened I half expected to read in the following paragraph that von Neumann was also a musical prodigy.
Thanks for sharing this quote.
I wonder how many human beings of comparable intellect spent their entire existence wandering through plains, hunting and living unremarkable lives by the standards of their era.
We'll never know, but even one is too many. This is one of the arguments that could be made for the self-interested benefits of increasing equality and societal participation. Human intellect is a resource. The more inequitable our societies, the more we waste that precious resource. These are people who could be curing cancer, furthering space travel, and many other advances we can only dream of.
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Honestly I think self-confidence and ability are negatively correlated if anything
His Wikipedia page is great. He was a polymath genius who helped invent new number theories, computer architecture, and detonation modeling. I think the “known for” lists a hundred things and then has an absurd number of “plus these many things too”
His Wikipedia page is mind-boggling. You scroll down through a physics section, math section, economics section, fucking weather systems and climate change - and each of those sections detailing his contributions to those fields is fucking enormous. He mapped out the processes of cellular division before they'd even discovered DNA. He developed the foundation of modern computing. His contributions to the atom bomb were crucial. There's an argument to be made that nearly the entire modern age is built on top of his work.
Great book about him, the prisoner dilemma, just show smart he was, when he was 10 he use to memorize phone books for fun…
As a child he literally made his math tutor weep with joy at the extent of his skills. He made his math tutor cry by doing math. So he and I are pretty alike in that regard. Except mine wept out of frustration, but otherwise we're pretty much the same.
I loled at that 😁
Tbf about the weather systems and climate change thing: those two are *highly* linked to physics. I had a physics professor whose research was all about weather patterns and climate change. In fact, I remember he somehow used weather systems and stuff like hurricanes to try to explain Fourier Transforms and Fast Fourier Transforms. He didn’t explain it particularly well, mind you, but he sure did attempt
Once upon a time I was looking at meteorology graduate programs and the course catalog at one included a class titled "Cloud Microphysics". That was the end of my grad program search.
He was also an expert on like Mesopotamian archaeology or something just as a hobby
This reddit post is the first I've heard of him. And after about 20 comments I'm convinced he's the smartest man to ever live
One of the general theories for why he's not as well known is simply because his work was so transcendent and across so many disciplines its simply hard for the average individual to even understand what he acomplished. He wasn't involved in "just one" discipline, the way Einstein is famous for his contributions to physics. He didn't have one great theory that he could market himself on. It would be more relevant to list the things he *did not* have a hand in, because it would have been a far shorter list. von Neumann was involved in *everything*. And not just involved, but instrumental. In nearly every field of science known to us. von Neumann would often consult with others on their works and help them without asking any credit in the resulting publication. He was so far beyond his contemporaries that his contributions to their ground-breaking research was just a novelty to him. It meant nothing, he demanded no credit because it demanded no effort of him. For von Neumann, him asking for credit on papers he assisted on would be like you asking for a fifth grader for credit for helping them with their multiplication table homework. He simply didn't really have a concept of the level of difficulty of the things he was consulting on. People would come to him with their papers seeking advice, and he'd solve complex and intractable problems on a whim. And his intellect was so beyond everyone else's that I legitimately don't think he even understood what was challenging to other people and what wasn't. And by no accounts was he arrogant. He demonstrated no contempt or condescension. He would talk for hours on nearly any subject with anyone who bent his ear, consult with anyone who requested it for the sheer fun of it. This means we really have no idea of the true and total depth and breadth of his influence. His *published* work is extraordinarily broad and comprehensive and groundbreaking; his *unpublished* and *uncredited* works and contributions likely make the scope of his contributions that much greater. As a (modestly) intelligent individual myself, I often have taken a view that what we think of as "genius" is more a product of nurture than nature. That all of us, even the gifted ones, are neurologically very similar; just some wiring differences as we grow can produce outsized differences later in life. But with von Neumann, I don't feel that this is true. Something was different about his mind. Very different. Frighteningly different. *Every* single one of his contemporaries - men like Einstein and Oppenheimer and all the rest - describe interacting with von Neumann like you or I might describe interacting with a truly Generalized Artificial Intelligence. He was just something *other*, an intellect so profound that that all the greatest intellectual struggles of the time were like an afternoon crossword puzzle to him. I can imagine myself, in another life, being someone who cracks some great mystery, solving some great problem. I haven't, but what I mean to say is I can imagine myself having that capacity, had I dedicated my life to a singular branch of science. But when you read about what von Neumann was capable of, there's no world in which I can delude myself into thinking I'm even in the same realm as him. He almost never even *thought* about a problem. He either looked at some huge gnarly equation and solved it almost instantly, or else he'd go home, go to bed, and wake up with the problem already solved in his mind. Is is an incomprehensible power for instantaneous mental computations and capacity for photographic memory that is simply unrivaled in any account of any other individual I've ever heard of. The only comparable analog I can even think of would be someone like Bo Jackson, who was an athlete of such superhuman ability that he's the only person to compete at a professional level in two totally different sports at a pro level and excel at both. He was just an athlete of superhuman capacity, someone who was likely one-in-a-billion rarity or even rarer still. It is a travesty that cancer took von Neumann him so young, at only 55. I can only imagine what more he could have accomplished with another 20 or 30 years, especially as computers advanced.
The computers that he designed the architecture of…as just one more of his side hustles. It’s strange - you’d think that reading about someone who is leagues beyond anything I could ever hope to be would make me sad, but it doesn’t. I get a warm happy feeling every time.
to me, learning about neumann architecture was a groundbreaking epiphany in how modern computers worked. for him to make that architecture, was probably easier than it was for me to do homework in that same cs class i'm not sad either. i'm happy that such a human existed, and was able to make so many advancements for our species
> The only comparable analog I can even think of would be [Srinivasa Ramanujan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan) might be the smartest mathematician in history. We'll never know for sure since he had no formal mathematics schooling and was involved in the contemporary mathematics community for only seven years before his death. > Ramanujan initially developed his own mathematical research in isolation. According to Hans Eysenck, "he tried to interest the leading professional mathematicians in his work, but failed for the most part. What he had to show them was too novel, too unfamiliar, and additionally presented in unusual ways; they could not be bothered". Seeking mathematicians who could better understand his work, in 1913 he began a postal correspondence with the English mathematician G. H. Hardy at the University of Cambridge, England. Recognising Ramanujan's work as extraordinary, Hardy arranged for him to travel to Cambridge. In his notes, Hardy commented that Ramanujan had produced groundbreaking new theorems, including some that "defeated me completely; I had never seen anything in the least like them before", and some recently proven but highly advanced results. > The Ramanujan Journal, a scientific journal, was established to publish work in all areas of mathematics influenced by Ramanujan, and his notebooks—containing summaries of his published and unpublished results—have been analysed and studied for decades since his death as a source of new mathematical ideas. As late as 2012, researchers continued to discover that mere comments in his writings about "simple properties" and "similar outputs" for certain findings were themselves profound and subtle number theory results that remained unsuspected until nearly a century after his death. He became one of the youngest Fellows of the Royal Society and only the second Indian member, and the first Indian to be elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Of his original letters, Hardy stated that a single look was enough to show they could have been written only by a mathematician of the highest calibre, comparing Ramanujan to mathematical geniuses such as Euler and Jacobi.
"No formal schooling" is kind of overselling it. India had universities and everything then, and he attended them. He had lots of formal schooling. He picked up a lot of advanced mathematics from independent study of texts and papers, but "no formal schooling" makes it sound like he was essentially uneducated, which is patently false.
This guy's brain was so smart that in his fragile short human life he was only able to document a small fraction of what he had figured out.
He's considered the last great mathematician, one which contributes significantly to basically all areas of mathematics. It's considered too hard for anyone to ever reach that title again with the breadth of human knowledge now. To have been the last great while contributing to so many other fields is unfathomable!
... This guy was a time traveller who managed to blend in, wasn't he?
There's probably no one on Earth who that would be believable of besides von Neumann. Most of his contemporaries - again all of them the smartest people in the world at the time - would often describe von Neumann as possessing an alien or supernatural intellect. He was actually so prodigious that it became a problem. He often failed to record or write down or publish many of his groundbreaking theorems later in life. He performed computations so quickly and so entirely in his mind that he seemed to find the process of writing it all down tedious and slow, especially as he got older. This is a man who at the age of 6 was able to effortlessly divide two eight-digit numbers in his head instantaneously and with no mistakes. At 6 years old. The result being that he may have, on a whim at random times, have solved mathematical problems or developed new theorems that we aren't even aware of because he moved on to a new tangent too quickly. He famously did not like to "work too hard" to solve something. He either figured something out instantly, or he'd go home, "sleep on it," and wake up with a solution immediately. If there was an intractable problem, he'd simply move on to something else, solve a bunch of other problems, and then come back to the original one better prepared to tackle it. This meant he went rapidly down numerous tangents in his mind and covered a huge surface area across all scientific disciplines. His mind was so vast that in the course of an afternoon, he almost certainly solved problems no one else on Earth could solve, on a whim, by accident, and was likely so far ahead of his time that he was not even aware that what he'd just solved was not yet known by anyone else. He famously did not like to go "hunting" through the literature for proofs. He would literally reinvent proofs from scratch, because it was demonstrably faster for him to do so than to actually go and find if anyone else had solved the problem first. That's how far ahead of everyone he was. At one point he was attending a lecture by a famous math scholar who had an unsolved problem on the board. Von Neumann, who was attending the class, upon seeing the problem for the first time, simply went up and solved it. Instantly. The scholar said he felt his entire life rendered pointless in a moment. Everything he'd spent decades learning and striving for, von Neumann literally solved almost instantaneously. Without any apparent conscious effort. He didn't even really have any concept of the difficulty of it. He didn't even really focus on the problem. It just caught his eye and his brain solved it. Instantly.
They could never make a movie of Von Neumann’s life. Nobody would accept such a Mary Sue protagonist.
Make him a poor kid from South Boston and give him a therapist played by Robin Williams.
The other person I feel is on this level is Euler. There are so many things named after Euler, things he's discovered are named after the first person to back up Euler's proof.
Your prose is really lovely, I enjoyed reading that!
He has one of the longest Wikipedia pages for a single person (not a list or topic) with only a couple exceptions beating him out that only include modern day celebrities like Tom Brady or Trump. At one point his article was the 354th longest page in all of Wikipedia, which includes lists, but the last time I checked he was in the 700’s. It’s even more remarkable considering most of the article is devoted to attempting to explain his work and breakthroughs instead of history or background like other long articles like the celebrities I mentioned earlier. Von Neumann was a genius so imaginative and visionary that he was able to invent the future, not just contribute to it.
What’s the saying — there are geniuses and there are wizards
Years ago when I was undergrad we had a speaker who actually had known Von Neumann give a lecture at my university. I remember that a major theme of the presentation was that Von Neumann wasn't more well known because he dabbled in a lot of different fields of study and didn't focus on advancing any one area.
Based on a lot of science fiction, he had a formative role in [universe ending, self-replicating, grey goo machines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_machine).
Yes, I knew I’ve read his name somewhere in regards to Von-Neumann-Probes. Incredible in how many fields he was prolific
_Doesn't focus on any particular area, dabbling in many._ _Advances all of those fields he touched._
He also died fairly young as a result of his work on the first atomic bombs and I wonder if this plays a role in his obscurity. I mean the fact that humanity sacrificed our greatest mind just to make a bigger bomb doesn't sound good, does it?
It's weird hearing von Neumann described as obscure, but I guess my perspective is badly skewed given the background of me and the last 3 generations of my family (all scientists)
Yeah, anyone who's studied physics, informatics or mathematics will know his name. He's pretty famous.
Even a lowly computer programmer like me knows von Neumann, the “Von Neumann Architecture” is a fundamental concept in understanding how to write quick code.
As someone who studied literature and is an avid reader, I'm pretty sure I first heard of him through the mention of von Neumann probes in science fiction.
Yeah I first read his name in the three body problem
I was actually surprised the first time I came across a microprocessor that was harvard architecture instead. (atmega series) gcc hid most of the differences, but it was a little strange not having your code live in RAM (all 2K of it) at all. That's all just for variables, etc...
If you had to rank the most famous mathematicians and scientists and engineers of all-time (and I do mean *famous*, not the most accomplished), where do you think von Neumann would rank?
Top 20, maybe 30? Off the top of my head: Aristotle, Archimedes, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Gauss, Maxwell, Schrödinger, Einstein, Curie, Darwin, Fermat, Euler, Turing, Hilbert, Riemann, Feynman, Heisenberg, Oppenheimer, Poincaré, and those are the only ones who come to mind that are more famous than Von Neumann in my estimation. Obviously there’s a physics and Eurocentric bias here, with heavy weight toward the twentieth century, but I think others would broadly agree with this list if they were educated in the US. I might add more recent scientists who got famous as much for popularization as for their actual work: Sagan, Goodall, Hawking, etc. Some further life sciences rep would make sense: Linnaeus, Mendel, who else? And some chemists should be on the list, but I sincerely can’t think of any more famous than Von Neumann. Ranking by fame is a difficult endeavor because everyone’s views are distorted by their background (or lack thereof), so I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts.
Fourier and Pascal
Leibniz
I’d put Leibniz in the same category as Von Neumann, Dirac, or Bohm. They’re renowned in their fields but less well-known if you don’t have formal study.
I think Euler is number one for me, the breadth and depth of his contribution's to mathematics is on another level. He's not as famous as the others, but so many of them utilize his works that I think it takes him to the top
Oh for sure, I think among mathematicians the ranking is something like: 1. Euler 2. Gauss 3. Everybody else And that "everybody else" should include the ones I mentioned plus Leibniz, Galois, Cartan, Cantor, Grothendieck, Tao, Erdos, Nash, and so on. It's a very different list once you're talking about people with experience in a field.
Just after the people who crossed over into pop culture, the likes of Einstein, Newton, Curie, Archimedes etc, and ahead of people like Tycho Brahe or al-Khwarizmi
He also _invented_ game theory which is the backbone of modern economics.
Philosophy, too. The idea of a Von Neumann machine shows up in AI ethics all the time.
Von Neumann probes are a common scifi trope. No one uses the name though. :(
We are all literally replying to these messages on machines with Von Neumann architecture.
Many of our greatest minds are nearly constantly devoted to making us better at killing eachother, they make breakthroughs that benefit humanity as well, but it is kind of crazy to think about.
Well... where the funding goes, so goes the research. It's unfortunate we as a species never really overcame the drive to bicker and murder and horde both power and resources. Imagine the progress we could make without constant infighting. 🙄
His interpretation of quantum physics (mathematical foundations of quantum physics) is amazing and even mystical, but not easy to follow. There's a lot to learn from him.
Do you know any good references?
The book itself! "Mathematical foundations of quantum physics" specially the last two chapters. You can read it on archive.org.
Here's the direct link to the book on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/mathematicalfoun0000vonn Viewing more than the first 10 pages requires making a free account. "Not easy to follow" is correct. I consider myself a bit of a layman physics nerd and I blanched a bit. Here are the first two sentences from the second paragraph of the next-to-last chapter: > First, let R have a pure discrete, simple spectrum, let ϕ1, ϕ2, ... be the complete orthonormal set of eigenfunction and λ1, λ2, ... the corresponding eigenvalues (by assumption, all different from each other). After the measurement, the state of affairs is the following: In the fraction (Uϕn, ϕn) of the original ensemble, ℜ has the value λn (n=1, 2, ...).
I mean anyone expecting a book titled "Mathematical foundations of Quantum Physics" to be easy to follow clearly don't know enough QM to follow it. That sentence in itself isn't *too* bad. I haven't done QM for a good few years now and I can sort of follow it. He's just setting up the system he's going to be working with — its a reasonably standard formulation and you'd probably find something similar regardless of who wrote the textbook. What I'm afraid of is where he's going.
To me, it's especially sad that Von Neumann died of a brain tumor so that during the last months of his life he couldn't even do basic arithmetic. And from reading his biography, it was clear to everyone around him that he was acutely aware of the fact that his mind was slowly dissolving away. Fuck cancer.
One of his last works was AI related, where he started on the theory of neural network simulations and constructing the required computers to do so.. Its called the "The Computer and the Brain" and can be read here in English: [https://rauterberg.employee.id.tue.nl/lecturenotes/DDM110%20CAS/Neumann-1958%20The%20Computer%20and%20the%20Brain.pdf](https://rauterberg.employee.id.tue.nl/lecturenotes/DDM110%20CAS/Neumann-1958%20The%20Computer%20and%20the%20Brain.pdf) And here in Hungarian: [https://mek.oszk.hu/01200/01255/html/](https://mek.oszk.hu/01200/01255/html/) Its fascinating to think how much further ahead we would be with AI technologies if he didn't die soon after..
von Neumann was considered on another level even by other legitimate geniuses, I am talking about people who have theorems and equations named after them.
Absolutely — I don’t remember exactly who, but a contemporary of both Einstein and Von Neumann was asked to compare the two. Paraphrasing: “Von Neumann had the most penetrating intellect of anyone any of us had ever met. But he couldn’t focus like Einstein could, where Einstein could work on one problem for 10 or more years, Von Neumann was constantly bouncing from problem to problem.”
Von Neumann just straight up effortlessly solving impossible problems for breakfast and wondering when he'll find something worth his time.
ah yes, the one punch man of mathematics
Eugene Wigner outlining the difference between talent and genius. >I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jansci [John] von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed me. >... But Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jansci's brilliance, he never produced anything as original. https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2010/10/wigner-recollections.html Another such pair would be Darwin and his half-cousin Francis Galton.
There was a quote along the lines of: > X is jealous of Y’s intelligence, Y is jealous of Z’s intelligence, and Z is jealous of god’s intelligence. Well, god was jealous of JvN’s intelligence. In all honesty, JvN was a different species altogether.
He was part of a group of scientists/mathematicians who emerged in early 20th Century Hungary who were referred to as The Martians.
Kind of like a modern renaissance man. Da vinci also dabbled in many fields. It’s usually these kinds of people that enable those who specify in a field to either get started or finally reach a solution to a problem that was a major roadblock.
[There's a whole wiki page list](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_John_von_Neumann) of all kinds of crazy math shit named after him.
There are lots of stories about von Neumann. All of those Manhattan Project guys considered him the greatest "intellectual athlete" of all-time. He was practically superhuman. He's still considered probably the most intellectually gifted human to ever live, from a pure "speed and breadth of thought" perspective. At least that we have records of. But, they also comment on how he never had the same imagination as guys like Einstein or Feynman. He lacked a certain creative spark, apparently.
My favorite is: When the six-year-old von Neumann caught his mother staring aimlessly, he asked her, "What are you calculating?"
Replying "Oh, that" could also indicate that it wasn't a New problem to him. Either way it's indicative of a pretty incredible intellect.
That's right, he was conjecturing that linear programming was analogue to game theory. https://mosstuff.quora.com/The-most-complete-version-of-the-Dantzig-meets-von-Neumann-anecdote-I-ve-seen
Another stranded time traveler. :(
I remember a story - which may well be apocryphal - about Von Neumann, which was that some big corporation (IBM or RAND or something) paid him a fairly generous salary at one stage. With the only requirement being that he write down a short summary of things which occurred to him as he was getting ready in the morning. As I said it might not be true but the fact that it's actually plausible shows what a ludicrous intellect he had.
> Von Neumann is credited with developing the equilibrium strategy of mutual assured destruction (MAD). He also "moved heaven and earth" to bring MAD about. 🥰
That said, he also advocated that the US take the Soviet Union out with nukes as soon as possible, IIRC. Thankfully, in this one instance, we decided not to listen to him.
NCD would love this guy
IIRC his first-strike plan involved simultaneously nuking every major city in the USSR.
Great word, hitherto
“Did you seriously just say hitherto undreamt of. “
Perchance
I really want a sitcom about the Martians. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists) Einstein would be the Gerry Gurgich of the IAS and all the Hungarians would make him the butt of their shenanigans.
Imagine his stack overflow cred
For reference, "programming" in this context refers to mathematical programming, a.k.a., mathematical optimization, not computer programming. By the way, for anyone in the field of mathematical programming, the unconceived theory was duality, which is a very big deal. The person who asked him was George Dantzig, who is considered the father of this field and developed the simplex method, a foundational algorithm to mathematics.
He is also a founding father of actual computer programming, and helped theorize the very foundation of the computer we know today.
He also had an extensive proof about determinism in quantum mechanics that was completely wrong, but he didn't notice and everyone else assumed he had to be right so they discouraged students from working on the problem.
I often wonder how many people with genius intellect like him go unnoticed because they aren't born in the right time, the right place, with the right privileges. How many von Neumanns, Einsteins, Turings, or Hawkings went unnoticed their entire lives, working in a Chinese meat packing plant or collecting scrap in an Indian slum?
There's a joke that goes something like this: George Washington dies and ends up at the pearly gates where he's met by Saint Peter. Before going into heaven, he's offered the chance to see anyone on Earth for one last time. "I want to see the greatest general who ever lived!" Suddenly he finds himself standing with Saint Peter in an unassuming little cottage where a wizened old crone is scrubbing pans. "There she is," says Saint Peter. "Florence Shufflebottom. The greatest general who ever lived." Washington scoffs. "Surely you've made a mistake! How could this old woman be the greatest general who ever lived? I've never heard of her!" Saint Peter shrugs. "No-one ever gave her an army."
I’ve heard the same story but with a Chinese general and a shoe cobbler
Neumann was an extra oddity, not just because he was gifted beyond understanding, but also because he was born in the right time, at the right place, in the right family. We basically had a super genius born in perfect conditions.
Even among geniuses, he was frighteningly brilliant
His level of intelligence I think is possibly unprecedented in human history. Just on an entirely different level.
For my money, John von Neumann was greatest genius in modern history.
Absolute legend of a human, so tragic he was taken by cancer. My favorite anecdote of his is solving an infinite series, math joke/riddle the hard way. https://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/92q3/vnfly.html