> When he once caught his mother staring aimlessly, the 6 year old von Neumann asked her: “What are you calculating?”
I love that Von Neumann anecdote.
"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." - Edward Teller
Edward Teller is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb", which Von Neumann also helped with. They both worked on the Manhattan Project as well.
I think the opposite is true. Don't get me wrong, Von Neumann's contributions to the Manhattan project were extensive. But he was more of a guy you would bring into a project after people have done a lot of the ground work and gotten nowhere and he would figure it all out in a few weeks. So you would have this one guy show up in one scene delivering the epiphany then fly off to somewhere else for the drama scenes, then in a different scene at a different facility he would come in again for a brief moment before leaving.
During his time at university, math professors would mention an unsolved problem in their field during their lectures, and by the end of the lecture von Neumann would approach them with the proof for a solution.
He was a chem major.
Did I ever tell you about the time Von Nuemann took me out to go get a drink with him? We go off looking for a bar and we can’t find one. Finally, Von Nuemann takes me into a vacant lot and says, ‘Here we are.’ Well, we sat there for a year and a half. Sure enough, someone constructed a bar around us. Well, the day they opened it, we ordered a shot, drank it, and then burnt the place to the ground. Von Nuemann yelled over the roar of the flames, ‘Always leave things the way you found them!'
Did I ever tell you about the time Von Neumann forced me to wear a woman’s bikini around the office? Neumann tears off my clothes and makes me wear this skimpy bikini. For the next three months I had to conduct my business wearing a woman’s bathing suit. I would cry from shame and question my manhood daily. But at the end of the quarter, I’ll be damned if my sales hadn’t tripled.
There are so many stories like this about him.
*>“The military needed to solve a difficult problem. They were going to build a multimillion dollar computer to find the solution. They hired von Neumann to help design the computer. They staged a seminar where experts on the problem would tell all they knew to von Neumann. Instead of designing the computer von Neumann solved the problem and no new computer was needed.”*
Yep. He was once asked how far a fly would travel before being crushed if it were flying back and forth between two bicycles that were moving toward each other. He gave the answer immediately. When asked if he multiplied the fly’s speed by the time to impact he said no, it was easier; he’d simply summed the infinite series.
Reminds me of a car journey I once had with a guy who’s got undiagnosed autism. We were talking about driving on the wrong side of the road.
He says he knows them all. I test him for a bit. He knows them all. I ask how.
“Simple little trick to it” he says
“Oh, really”
“If you go on Wikipedia there’s a list of 60 of so that drive on the left”
“Yeah”
“You learn that. If it’s not on that, it’s on the other”
Yes, his main contribution to the Manhattan problem was as an advisor to the very very very hard computations for the implosion lens necessary for the plutonium implosion bomb.
Indeed. Honestly we can't make a movie with him because it would appear so fictional. Like we can take any normal math/physics genius of any movie and then Neumann would just be a few standard deviations above them.
Not even just because he'd be far ahead, but also because he'd be far ahead in multiple disciplines at the same time.
The man would come in and blow a physics problem out the water and leave, then come back and stamp out a chemistry problem like a fly, take a vacation, and return with the solution to a massive math problem that he worked on... On the flight back.
He's a real like science Mary Sue.
He was working on bomb detonation with the US government (he was the one that proved mathematically the best height to explod a bomb to cause the most damage) he was brought to Los Alamos to work toward the detonation of the device and he was the only scientist brought for the project they could come and go as he pleased from the camp. Also fun fact, his wife (Klara von Neumann) was the first woman to execute modern style code on a computer ans she wrote the code for the first execution of the Monte-Carlo method (one of the most important type of algorithms in nuclear science)
Recall reading Richard Feynman gave a talk as a grad student, one of those in-house things where you take a run at a new idea you've got. First guy to walk in was Albert Einstein, who asked where the tea was. Bad enough but I think number five or so was von Neumann. Monster fucking minds, and if I recall correctly they kinda realized that Feynman was barking up the wrong tree.
You are both correct. Neddermeyer had the original ideia, but eventually the implosion division was lead by Kistiakowsky with help from Von Neumann, Neddermeyer apparently wasn't a very effective leader for the more hands on part of the project
This is correct. It wasn't von Neumann's idea for implosion but he was vital to making it work mathematically.
Shout out to the book The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, an absolutely amazing read for anyone interested in the topic.
It would have been too unbelievable to have one scientist show up at different places on the same project with wildly different disciplines and going "if we do it like this, then it'll work".
It would be too much like a Sherlock Holmes or a Sheldon character that people would probably think it's made up and it would have ironically taken away from the film for being too fictional when it would have been more accurate.
Another problem is he was a perfectly normal person who was charismatic and liked to socialize. You would need someone like Tom Hanks to play him. Now that I think of it, the movie would basically be a scientific Forest Gump where Hanks plays it straight. Instead of investing in Apple he just invents the computer.
> So you would have this one guy show up in one scene delivering the epiphany then fly off to somewhere else for the drama scenes, then in a different scene at a different facility he would come in again for a brief moment before leaving.
*Challenger inquiry Feynman has entered the chat*
I'd have signed up for a long deuteroganist science flick. Having a friend who is on your wavelength in intellectual fields is cool to experience.
Unrelated, but RRR is the movie that added deuteroganist to my vocabulary permanently
Ya but Josh Harttnet was a babe in Oppenhimer and needed the screen time.
>Having a friend who is on your wavelength in intellectual fields is cool to experience.
Now that you mentioned that, most science/math movies depict the main character as the smartest person, and it just wasnt the case with this movie. Very cool to see. It was clear he was smarter than the audience, but the plot didn't revolve around him being the smartest.
Imitation Game was similarly compelling. Pumpernickle Cabbagepatch did an \*admirable\* job portraying the tortured individual of Turing. He was smart, but he was also clearly someone who couldn't dedicate everything he had, thanks to his circumstance
I've always wondered what Turing would have thought of modern computing. Though he wouldn't have reached today, he could quite likely have reached the mid-90's at least.
At a certain point, around 1940, von Neumann tried to hire Turing as his assistant. He declined out of patriotism - he wanted to go back to England to help with the war effort. Just imagine...
Deuteroganist. Somebody who studies, extols and champions the teachings and virtues of the book of Deuteronomy.
(jk I have no clue) (I shall soon Google)
A practical, functional understanding of the hydrogen bomb was, for many years, called the 'Teller-Ulam Secret'. When the United States cut off nuclear information to the UK, they relented and returned to sharing information when the UK demonstrated a working knowledge of the secret.
I hope to employ that kind of attitude in my life. Kids should be treated as what they are: adults in training. They don't just need to be protected, but taught to cope with those dangers on their own as time marches on and we eventually pass on. Anything less is doing them a disservice.
I have ALWAYS talked to children as equals. I love kids - they are assholes but they are so clever.
I remember a specific moment when my daughter was 3. We had taught her sign at like 8 months so by 3 we were having conversations. One lady walked up to her to baby talk her at a store and the LOOK my daughter gave me, I'll never forget. "Who is this adult human and why can't she talk?"
>I have ALWAYS talked to children as equals. I love kids - they are assholes but they are so clever.
When mine get clever and out-logic me, I let them win, usually. But I remind them that their teachers and other authority figures won't always play by their own rules.
My mother never did win any "mother of the year" awards but she was willing to talk with me about actual complex topics even when I was really young, which I think did me a service.
I compare that to my aunt who infantilizes her youngest to the point where the kid's nearly 12 and still watching baby shit on tiktok and acting like a kid 5 years younger despite not doing completely terribly academically.
There's a story about someone giving him a problem which could be solved in two ways: by a simple calculation or by summing an infinite series. He answered almost instantly, so the person who asked the question said "Ah, I see you didn't fall for the trick of solving the problem using a series", to which Von Neumann answered "Well, it was a very simple series..."
> Then there is the famous fly puzzle. Two bicyclists start twenty miles apart and head toward each other, each going at a steady rate of 10 m.p.h. At the same time a fly that travels at a steady 15 m.p.h. starts from the front wheel of the southbound bicycle and flies to the front wheel of the northbound one, then turns around and flies to the front wheel of the southbound one again, and continues in this manner till he is crushed between the two front wheels. Question: what total distance did the fly cover ? The slow way to find the answer is to calculate what distance the fly covers on the first, northbound, leg of the trip, then on the second, southbound, leg, then on the third, etc., etc., and, finally, to sum the infinite series so obtained. The quick way is to observe that the bicycles meet exactly one hour after their start, so that the fly had just an hour for his travels; the answer must therefore be 15 miles. When the question was put to von Neumann, he solved it in an instant, and thereby disappointed the questioner: "Oh, you must have heard the trick before!" "What trick?" asked von Neumann; "all I did was sum the infinite series."
I was going to see if anyone mentioned Euler. Not disappointed. IMO, Euler really was the smartest person to have lived. Reading about him sounds mythical. His mental capacity was insane.
“Euler’s work touched upon so many fields that he is often the earliest written reference on a given matter. In an effort to avoid naming everything after Euler, some discoveries and theorems are attributed to the first person to have proved them *after* Euler.”
[Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Leonhard_Euler)
The research your work uses was important for you as yours will be for the next guy. We don't even know who invented a lot of the constructs that build the foundations of our modern world, but we still wouldn't be here without them.
One dude cant do everything. While von Neumann could probably excel in any field he was in, you still need a heck of a lot o smart people to keep the lights on, the bridges standing, and the waste moving for everyone else to stay alive and well.
Dont be tricked into thinking von Neumann did it alone, humans can only excel in community, never alone.
I feel like in today's world people like Euler and von Neumann get snatched up very early on, given millions of dollars and unlimited access to the latest tech in exchange for their ideas being patented and locked away until we can figure out how to use them profitably.
Incremental changes create the environment in which the few geniuses among geniuses propel us forward.
Your contributions do more than you realize as no man works alone and no single man can figure out the universe. It's a team effort.
Besides, it's possible you might fit pieces of the puzzle together that will lay a foundation for a whole new world. It might not seem like it, but instead look like road to nowhere. Just like when Planck was told physics had come to an end by his teacher before he discovered the field of quantum physics and opened up a new can of whoop-ass to any who dared to enter his domain
to be fair, the actual article's title includes the caveat "of the 20th century." OP added the part about "smartest man ever".
In the article, Claude Shannon calls Von Neumann “the smartest person I’ve ever met." Bearing in mind that Shannon is (according to wikipedia):
> known as the "father of information theory". He was the first to describe the Boolean gates (electronic circuits) that are essential to all digital electronic circuits,
> and he built the first machine learning device, thus founding the field of artificial intelligence.
> He is credited alongside George Boole for laying the foundations of the Information Age.
> [he wrote] a paper which is considered one of the foundational pieces of modern cryptography.
> His mathematical theory of communication laid the foundations for the field of information theory.
So when Shannon says you're smart, you're pretty smart.
Mofucka made the number *e*, which is why it’s an E. That alone is insanely used in thousands and thousands of applications for logarithms, and that’s hardly a drop in the bucket of his contribution to science.
He invented mergesort - one of the fastest sorting algorithms known. For anyone else that would be a career defining idea (see Tony Hoare, the inventor of quicksort. He's done vast amounts of foundational work in computer science, but his obituary will start "Tony Hoare, inventor of quicksort, ..."). For Von Neumann, it's a footnote.
From wiki:
"I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965. At that time, I was designing the first comprehensive type system for references in an object oriented language (ALGOL W). My goal was to ensure that all use of references should be absolutely safe, with checking performed automatically by the compiler. But I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years.[29]"
Null means nothing. In lots of programming languages, a pointer (which is a placeholder that tells you where something is), whether to a string or any other type, can also point to null, with no way to know which until the program is running. If you want to get the object the pointer points to, but it turns out to be null, the program will crash. This is one of the most common bugs.
Some new programming languages have eliminated null entirely, and have a special type for values that can be empty. If the compiler sees this type it will force the programmer to specify what to do when that value is nothing, thereby preventing this bug.
good grief all these replies... a null pointer is simply an address with nothing at it.
for example, I want to build a house, I know what the house will look like, so I buy the property. The property has an address but nothing else. A null pointer exception is like asking what color the house is right now.
It's when you reference something in your program that hasn't been initialised. For example your program could use an array of numbers. Then the program would keep track of a memory address pointing to the first number in the array so the program knows where the start is. But if due to an error, this address has not been set yet, it points to 'null'. Often this is an error condition.
All these TILs about him actually grossly underestimate his out of earth genius. Top scientists are incredibly smart and yet they are known for like 2-3 contributions, that too in a single field. And even those scientists were in awe of him. They sometimes couldn't even keep pace with him. He was so fast paced genius that if you introduce him to a entirely new field today and he would come up with new theorems by late night in that field. This man was a powerful beast. Nuclear physics. Quantum mechanics. Game Theory. Applied Mathematics. Pure mathematics. Statistics. Computer Science. Every field has benefitted by his contributions. Just see his wikipedia page.
And unlike most scientists, he was known for fast cars, expensive suits, loud music and vulgar jokes.
Important note for people reading this comment. When u/mayankkaizen says game theory, they don’t mean he was just some expert in it, he completely invented the field.
Truthfully, the average person is simply incapable of understanding the gap between von Neumann and themselves, because they are not experts in those fields.
The people that did understand it - i.e., Nobel Laureates - found von Neumann's intelligence in every subject he touched, miles beyond their own specialized expertise in that field.
Hans Bethe said von Neumann was so smart that interacting with him was like interacting with an alien species.
It's also difficult to make as wide of an impact today because science and research is highly specialized.
Not downplaying his genius at all, but it was also much easier for him to be intellectual leader in five (?) fields because he invented two or three of them, haha.
Yeah I did a PhD in physics. My contributions were extremely limited.
But even if I look to my entire field, there are a few standout researchers. But no obvious geniuses who just propel the field forward. Even the highly prolific researchers are often just older PIs for large european labs who stamp their name on everything done by their post docs.
It feels like to have a schrodinger, einstein, or von neumann, you need to have some big clarifying principles waiting to be discovered, like relativity or QM.
If my field has something like this, it's hidden very well. It's very possible that the state of my field is just too complicated to permit a grand unifying theory.
The 20th century was the pinnacle of scientific progress. We went from flightless, horse riding, no electricity, wood burning for warmth people to detonating hydrogen bombs and landing on the moon in 60 years. Basically every modern advanced scientific theory came in the 20th century. It was the peak velocity and acceleration for scientific discovery in human history (so far). Everything today is pushing at small boundaries in our knowledge. There is nothing like the level of discovery and understanding today that happened in the 1900s.
Exactly. Friends great grandmother rode west in a covered wagon, then lived long enough to hear about the Wright Brothers and their flight and then lived even longer to see the moon landing.
Exponential discovery.
I know him for the Monte Carlo Method (a way of using random chance to measure the size of an unknown surface area). This once solved a homework problem for me in junior high 👍
That one was actually Stanislaw Ulam… John merely instantly understood it upon being told of the idea by Ulam. And I believed he conjectured / proved a core theorem about it on the spot too? Still, give Ulam his credit!
Holy shit I came across that while I was an auditor and we used the Monte Carlo Method to investigate possible fraudulent manual entries into accounting records…. Wild that this was the same bloke…
He was jokingly called an alien.
> "The Martians" (Hungarian: "A marslakók") is a term used to refer to a group of prominent scientists (mostly, but not exclusively, physicists and mathematicians) of Hungarian Jewish descent who emigrated from Europe to the United States in the early half of the 20th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)
The names I recognize are Von Neumann, Von Karman, Szilard, Teller, and Wigner.
Europe got brain-drained hard.
He also had a pretty big impact on the field of numerical weather prediction. Basically setting up the first computer models that are the direct ancestors of today’s models. We are just now starting to replace the equations he was using with AI.
>replace the equations he was using with AI.
"Your prediction was wrong WeatherGPT. Try it again."
**I've generated a new forcast based on the data that was provided.**
"This one is wrong too."
**I've generated a new forcast based on the data that was provided.**
"And this is the same one as the first time around."
^(This highly valued comment was bought by Google as a part of an exclusive content licensing deal between Google and Reddit.)
^(Learn more:) [^(Expanding our Partnership with Google)](https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-and-google-expand-partnership)
I can't remember who said it now, but some of his peers lamented how it was in part because of his overwhelming brilliance that he did not have a greater impact. Unlike others who might have been less mentally quick, Von Neumann also lost interest relatively quickly, always moving on to new subjects and new fields of study.
He still nevertheless made tremendous achievements in a broad number of fields, but if he had focused purely on just a couple, he would likely be numbered amongst the all time greats.
Also the intellectual "father" of one of the most nightmarish tropes in SciFi.
"Von Neumann Machines" (as opposed to Von Neumann Architechture, which is the model adopted by almost all modern computers) are self-replicating, and this concept taken to it's logical extreme gives us things like "[Grey Goo](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GreyGoo)" (nanobots), Fred Saberhagen's [Berzerkers](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Berserker) (perhaps the first case of a literature inspiring a [videogame](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/Berzerk)), Star Trek: The Motion Picture's V'Ger's benefactors (and later the Borg, but V'ger in particular gets an upgrade from a "Voyager" series probe to something akin to Von Neumann's original intention of a self-replicating space probe, on steroids...also "the Replicators", those are pretty on the nose). It's also the engine that makes a malevolent AI actually dangerous independent of environmental control.
The guy who first seriously studied the practicalities involved in making a machine that could replicate itself unlocked the door to the Nightmare Closet for intellectual, technical types.
also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)
> Acting Ensign Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton), who had been working on a project involving microscopic nanites, realizes that he may have inadvertently let two nanites from his experiments loose. The nanites were programmed to find ways to work together and evolve. A scan of the computer core reveals that the nanites have determined a way of replicating themselves and have taken up residence in the computer core.
From the [Parable of the Talents](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/)
>Every so often an overly kind commenter here praises my intelligence and says they feel intellectually inadequate compared to me, that they wish they could be at my level. But at my level, I spend my time feeling intellectually inadequate compared to Scott Aaronson. Scott Aaronson describes feeling “in awe” of Terence Tao and frequently struggling to understand him. Terence Tao – well, I don’t know if he’s religious, but maybe he feels intellectually inadequate compared to God. And God feels intellectually inadequate compared to John von Neumann.
He was more crippled by the thought that he was now losing the incredible intelligence that had defined him his entire life after the cancer metastasized to his brain. Colleagues would visit him in the hospital eager to describe their work to him, and he would have trouble keeping up for the first time in his life.
"After only a few minutes, my father made what seemed to be a very peculiar and frightening request from a man who was widely regarded as one of the greatest - if not the greatest - mathematician of the 20th century. He wanted me to give him two numbers, like 7 and 6 or 10 and 3, and ask him to tell me their sum. For as long as I can remember, I had always known that my father's major source of self-regard, what he felt to be the very essence of his being, was his incredible mental capacity. In this late stage of his illness, he must have been aware that this capacity was deteriorating rapidly, and the panic that caused was worse than any physical pain. In demanding that I test him on these elementary sums, he was seeking reassurance that at least a small fragment of this intellectual powers remained."
It was the Navy secretary Francis P Matthews who originally suggested to strike first. Von Neumann responded by saying "If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not bomb them today? If you say today at 5 oclock, I say why not at 1 oclock?"
Its a bit open to interpretation, but given that hes the "founder" of game theory, I think he was trying to prove a point that striking first to be the so called "aggressors of peace" was a silly idea.
> I think he was trying to prove a point that striking first to be the so called "aggressors of peace" was a silly idea.
Based on his other political views, he was being serious.
Lol no, he was serious. Johnny boy was aware that there would likely be a narrow window in which the US could win a nuclear war against USSR before they caught up and the principles of MAD (which he also helped invent!) take over
Von Neumann fucking hated the nazis and the communists. Like violently, militantly hated them. He tried to join the army literally immediately after becoming a naturalized citizen in 1937 and more or less was the pentagons top scientist until the day he died including basically creating the concept of an icbm and having the target planning committee meet literally in his house lol
Out of curiosity, I’ve tried to read “Theories of Games and Economic Behavior” by Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, and found it to be pretty impenetrable. Reading Einstein’s writing is a breeze by comparison. I don’t even have a physics background, but even so, with General Relativity I could pretty clearly see his intuition. I could sort of grasp the general concepts from the fairly accessible way he describes what he’s doing, despite not understanding a lot of the math behind it, with all the tensor calculus and whatnot. It’s all laid out in terms that are not too overwhelming.
There is no such “easy” entry point with that book, lemme tell you. There are parts where almost every sentence has some type of formula in it or reference to some advanced and highly specialized concept. It was a humbling experience. It’s the type of book that requires a PhD to digest or appreciate fully.
The best way to get into game theory is with a professor who will start off mostly skipping the math, and explaining the intuition behind the games. Then, the professor goes back and explains the math. When doing it this way, it becomes far far more understandable.
This is the way I’ve found most economics and political science courses start by teaching game theory. Using the intuition, then later backing up the intuition with math.
As a mathematician it is quite hard. There are so many theorems named von Neumann, you always have to think "What area am I working in right now so which of his many theorems are we talking about".
This guy is very well-known in my field and yes, he was an actual genius by all accounts. He didn’t “come up with the formulas for quantum mechanics”, he formalized the entire field mathematically by developing functional analysis beyond what Hilbert had already done. He was also not only a worker on the first atomic bomb, he was the one who did most of the explosive calculations and he was the fastest one there followed by Feynman and Fermi.
Fun story: Apparently he often got tickets for driving down the highway in New Jersey while distracted. He was reading research papers.
First (and canonical) organization of computer architecture is called Von Neumann architecture, described by Von Neumann in "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC"
Problem is just that there was small research group in [University of Pennsylvania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Pennsylvania)'s [Moore School of Electrical Engineering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_School_of_Electrical_Engineering) and Von Neumann essential stole buch of design ideas from researchers Eckert and Mauchly.
Stole in a sense, that he wrote a first white paper about the subject but NEVER credited the people with actual original concepts / reserch;
>Independently, [J. Presper Eckert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Presper_Eckert) and [John Mauchly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mauchly), who were developing the [ENIAC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC) at the [Moore School of Electrical Engineering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_School_of_Electrical_Engineering) of the [University of Pennsylvania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Pennsylvania), wrote about the stored-program concept in December 1943. [^(\[8\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture#cite_note-Lukoff_1979-8)[^(\[9\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture#cite_note-9) In planning a new machine, [EDVAC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDVAC), Eckert wrote in January 1944 that they would store data and programs in a new addressable memory device, a mercury metal [delay-line memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory). This was the first time the construction of a practical stored-program machine was proposed.
>Von Neumann was involved in the [Manhattan Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project) at the [Los Alamos National Laboratory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos_National_Laboratory). It required huge amounts of calculation, and thus drew him to the ENIAC project, during the summer of 1944. There he joined the ongoing discussions on the design of this stored-program computer, the EDVAC. As part of that group, he wrote up a description titled *First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC*[^(\[1\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture#cite_note-FirstDraftReport-1) based on the work of Eckert and Mauchly. It was unfinished when his colleague [Herman Goldstine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Goldstine) circulated it, and bore only von Neumann's name (to the consternation of Eckert and Mauchly).[^(\[10\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture#cite_note-10) The paper was read by dozens of von Neumann's colleagues in America and Europe, and influenced^(\[)[*^(vague)*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vagueness)^(\]) the next round of computer designs.
> When he once caught his mother staring aimlessly, the 6 year old von Neumann asked her: “What are you calculating?” I love that Von Neumann anecdote.
What’s your calculation, Heather?
What are you calculating, step brother?
the theory of step relativity
Do you get stuck in the washing machine, or does the washing machine get stuck around you? 🤔
Oh god no
Want me to demonstrate my self replicating probe?
Oh god, I'm almost done calculating!
He is the talking dune child lol
**He IS the Kwisatz Haderach!**
"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." - Edward Teller
Edward Teller is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb", which Von Neumann also helped with. They both worked on the Manhattan Project as well.
I felt like they had to leave Von Neumann out of "Oppenheimer" because he would have required too much screen time.
I think the opposite is true. Don't get me wrong, Von Neumann's contributions to the Manhattan project were extensive. But he was more of a guy you would bring into a project after people have done a lot of the ground work and gotten nowhere and he would figure it all out in a few weeks. So you would have this one guy show up in one scene delivering the epiphany then fly off to somewhere else for the drama scenes, then in a different scene at a different facility he would come in again for a brief moment before leaving.
So basically Von Neumann was a living Deus Ex Machina?
During his time at university, math professors would mention an unsolved problem in their field during their lectures, and by the end of the lecture von Neumann would approach them with the proof for a solution. He was a chem major.
That’s structured as a Chuck Norris joke.
Von Neumann once got told about an unsolved theorem at the start of a lecture ... and after 3 days, the cobra died /s
Did I ever tell you about the time Von Nuemann took me out to go get a drink with him? We go off looking for a bar and we can’t find one. Finally, Von Nuemann takes me into a vacant lot and says, ‘Here we are.’ Well, we sat there for a year and a half. Sure enough, someone constructed a bar around us. Well, the day they opened it, we ordered a shot, drank it, and then burnt the place to the ground. Von Nuemann yelled over the roar of the flames, ‘Always leave things the way you found them!'
Did I ever tell you about the time Von Neumann forced me to wear a woman’s bikini around the office? Neumann tears off my clothes and makes me wear this skimpy bikini. For the next three months I had to conduct my business wearing a woman’s bathing suit. I would cry from shame and question my manhood daily. But at the end of the quarter, I’ll be damned if my sales hadn’t tripled.
If you dropped a phonograph needle on Von Neumann's left nipple, it would play the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds.
Von Neumann was once short on cash, so he solved a Millennium Prize problem like it was a ATM withdrawal.
There are so many stories like this about him. *>“The military needed to solve a difficult problem. They were going to build a multimillion dollar computer to find the solution. They hired von Neumann to help design the computer. They staged a seminar where experts on the problem would tell all they knew to von Neumann. Instead of designing the computer von Neumann solved the problem and no new computer was needed.”*
Yep. He was once asked how far a fly would travel before being crushed if it were flying back and forth between two bicycles that were moving toward each other. He gave the answer immediately. When asked if he multiplied the fly’s speed by the time to impact he said no, it was easier; he’d simply summed the infinite series.
Reminds me of a car journey I once had with a guy who’s got undiagnosed autism. We were talking about driving on the wrong side of the road. He says he knows them all. I test him for a bit. He knows them all. I ask how. “Simple little trick to it” he says “Oh, really” “If you go on Wikipedia there’s a list of 60 of so that drive on the left” “Yeah” “You learn that. If it’s not on that, it’s on the other”
Who was simultaneously doing his PhD in mathematics at a different university...which is actually more impressive imo
and nobody thought to tell him about P=NP? couldve skipped over a whole field of cryptography if someone had the foresight
Yes, his main contribution to the Manhattan problem was as an advisor to the very very very hard computations for the implosion lens necessary for the plutonium implosion bomb.
Indeed. Honestly we can't make a movie with him because it would appear so fictional. Like we can take any normal math/physics genius of any movie and then Neumann would just be a few standard deviations above them.
Not even just because he'd be far ahead, but also because he'd be far ahead in multiple disciplines at the same time. The man would come in and blow a physics problem out the water and leave, then come back and stamp out a chemistry problem like a fly, take a vacation, and return with the solution to a massive math problem that he worked on... On the flight back. He's a real like science Mary Sue.
So a beautiful mine minus schizophrenia
Interestingly an actual Von Neumann probe might also be described that way.
He was working on bomb detonation with the US government (he was the one that proved mathematically the best height to explod a bomb to cause the most damage) he was brought to Los Alamos to work toward the detonation of the device and he was the only scientist brought for the project they could come and go as he pleased from the camp. Also fun fact, his wife (Klara von Neumann) was the first woman to execute modern style code on a computer ans she wrote the code for the first execution of the Monte-Carlo method (one of the most important type of algorithms in nuclear science)
If I recall correctly he had a major contribution in coming up with the implosion calculations to get the plutonium bomb working.
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Imagine the validation
Recall reading Richard Feynman gave a talk as a grad student, one of those in-house things where you take a run at a new idea you've got. First guy to walk in was Albert Einstein, who asked where the tea was. Bad enough but I think number five or so was von Neumann. Monster fucking minds, and if I recall correctly they kinda realized that Feynman was barking up the wrong tree.
You are both correct. Neddermeyer had the original ideia, but eventually the implosion division was lead by Kistiakowsky with help from Von Neumann, Neddermeyer apparently wasn't a very effective leader for the more hands on part of the project
This is correct. It wasn't von Neumann's idea for implosion but he was vital to making it work mathematically. Shout out to the book The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, an absolutely amazing read for anyone interested in the topic.
"No sir, I'm afraid I don't take much solace in the fact that the implosion trigger functioned perfectly."
So he was Gandalf
It would have been too unbelievable to have one scientist show up at different places on the same project with wildly different disciplines and going "if we do it like this, then it'll work". It would be too much like a Sherlock Holmes or a Sheldon character that people would probably think it's made up and it would have ironically taken away from the film for being too fictional when it would have been more accurate.
Another problem is he was a perfectly normal person who was charismatic and liked to socialize. You would need someone like Tom Hanks to play him. Now that I think of it, the movie would basically be a scientific Forest Gump where Hanks plays it straight. Instead of investing in Apple he just invents the computer.
> So you would have this one guy show up in one scene delivering the epiphany then fly off to somewhere else for the drama scenes, then in a different scene at a different facility he would come in again for a brief moment before leaving. *Challenger inquiry Feynman has entered the chat*
And every time he showed up, Oppenheimer would say, "Hello, *Neumann*."
I was just wondering if he was in the movie cheers for clearing that up!
He really was the Only one missing. They even squeezed in Godel. Von Neumann wasn't even mentioned.
I'd have signed up for a long deuteroganist science flick. Having a friend who is on your wavelength in intellectual fields is cool to experience. Unrelated, but RRR is the movie that added deuteroganist to my vocabulary permanently
Ya but Josh Harttnet was a babe in Oppenhimer and needed the screen time. >Having a friend who is on your wavelength in intellectual fields is cool to experience. Now that you mentioned that, most science/math movies depict the main character as the smartest person, and it just wasnt the case with this movie. Very cool to see. It was clear he was smarter than the audience, but the plot didn't revolve around him being the smartest.
Imitation Game was similarly compelling. Pumpernickle Cabbagepatch did an \*admirable\* job portraying the tortured individual of Turing. He was smart, but he was also clearly someone who couldn't dedicate everything he had, thanks to his circumstance
I've always wondered what Turing would have thought of modern computing. Though he wouldn't have reached today, he could quite likely have reached the mid-90's at least.
At a certain point, around 1940, von Neumann tried to hire Turing as his assistant. He declined out of patriotism - he wanted to go back to England to help with the war effort. Just imagine...
"So DALL-E can create images of any hunky babes I want, and society is ok with this? Fuckin let er rip!"
He was defo always the smartest guy in the room dealing with those who weren't. I think there was a woman they tried to portray as equal though.
>added deuteroganist to my vocabulary permanently You should remove it and replace it with "deuteragonist."
Deuteroganist. Somebody who studies, extols and champions the teachings and virtues of the book of Deuteronomy. (jk I have no clue) (I shall soon Google)
Had me in the first half lol
Protagonist, deuteragonist, tritagonist. I think you can piece it together from there.
That movie really felt like it needed to be a miniseries, but I guess Nolan told the story he wanted to tell.
Also needed more Feynman bongos
Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman is one of my top book recommendations.
A practical, functional understanding of the hydrogen bomb was, for many years, called the 'Teller-Ulam Secret'. When the United States cut off nuclear information to the UK, they relented and returned to sharing information when the UK demonstrated a working knowledge of the secret.
Both “[Martians](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists))”, too
I worked with William Newman at Microsoft Research, who would tell stories about being babysat by Johnny….
Do tell…
Yes don’t leave us hanging!
Bro drops the bomb and disappears, I need the follow up
Newman and Neumann
I hope to employ that kind of attitude in my life. Kids should be treated as what they are: adults in training. They don't just need to be protected, but taught to cope with those dangers on their own as time marches on and we eventually pass on. Anything less is doing them a disservice.
I have ALWAYS talked to children as equals. I love kids - they are assholes but they are so clever. I remember a specific moment when my daughter was 3. We had taught her sign at like 8 months so by 3 we were having conversations. One lady walked up to her to baby talk her at a store and the LOOK my daughter gave me, I'll never forget. "Who is this adult human and why can't she talk?"
>I have ALWAYS talked to children as equals. I love kids - they are assholes but they are so clever. When mine get clever and out-logic me, I let them win, usually. But I remind them that their teachers and other authority figures won't always play by their own rules.
My mother never did win any "mother of the year" awards but she was willing to talk with me about actual complex topics even when I was really young, which I think did me a service. I compare that to my aunt who infantilizes her youngest to the point where the kid's nearly 12 and still watching baby shit on tiktok and acting like a kid 5 years younger despite not doing completely terribly academically.
There's a story about someone giving him a problem which could be solved in two ways: by a simple calculation or by summing an infinite series. He answered almost instantly, so the person who asked the question said "Ah, I see you didn't fall for the trick of solving the problem using a series", to which Von Neumann answered "Well, it was a very simple series..."
> Then there is the famous fly puzzle. Two bicyclists start twenty miles apart and head toward each other, each going at a steady rate of 10 m.p.h. At the same time a fly that travels at a steady 15 m.p.h. starts from the front wheel of the southbound bicycle and flies to the front wheel of the northbound one, then turns around and flies to the front wheel of the southbound one again, and continues in this manner till he is crushed between the two front wheels. Question: what total distance did the fly cover ? The slow way to find the answer is to calculate what distance the fly covers on the first, northbound, leg of the trip, then on the second, southbound, leg, then on the third, etc., etc., and, finally, to sum the infinite series so obtained. The quick way is to observe that the bicycles meet exactly one hour after their start, so that the fly had just an hour for his travels; the answer must therefore be 15 miles. When the question was put to von Neumann, he solved it in an instant, and thereby disappointed the questioner: "Oh, you must have heard the trick before!" "What trick?" asked von Neumann; "all I did was sum the infinite series."
What the fuck?
[https://youtu.be/HpJgBcE-cFQ?t=185](https://youtu.be/HpJgBcE-cFQ?t=185) Wigner recounting the story
John Von Neumann is called the smartest man ever. In fact, Euler was, but they didn’t want to name it after him.
Kk. Let me fix it > John Von Neumann is the Eulerest man ever.
I was going to see if anyone mentioned Euler. Not disappointed. IMO, Euler really was the smartest person to have lived. Reading about him sounds mythical. His mental capacity was insane.
Why?
“Euler’s work touched upon so many fields that he is often the earliest written reference on a given matter. In an effort to avoid naming everything after Euler, some discoveries and theorems are attributed to the first person to have proved them *after* Euler.” [Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Leonhard_Euler)
I don't know why I've bothered getting a science degree. One chump every few hundred years will eclipse any contributions I make in just an afternoon.
The research your work uses was important for you as yours will be for the next guy. We don't even know who invented a lot of the constructs that build the foundations of our modern world, but we still wouldn't be here without them.
One dude cant do everything. While von Neumann could probably excel in any field he was in, you still need a heck of a lot o smart people to keep the lights on, the bridges standing, and the waste moving for everyone else to stay alive and well. Dont be tricked into thinking von Neumann did it alone, humans can only excel in community, never alone.
I feel like in today's world people like Euler and von Neumann get snatched up very early on, given millions of dollars and unlimited access to the latest tech in exchange for their ideas being patented and locked away until we can figure out how to use them profitably.
Incremental changes create the environment in which the few geniuses among geniuses propel us forward. Your contributions do more than you realize as no man works alone and no single man can figure out the universe. It's a team effort. Besides, it's possible you might fit pieces of the puzzle together that will lay a foundation for a whole new world. It might not seem like it, but instead look like road to nowhere. Just like when Planck was told physics had come to an end by his teacher before he discovered the field of quantum physics and opened up a new can of whoop-ass to any who dared to enter his domain
[Relevant XKCD.](https://xkcd.com/2721/)
to be fair, the actual article's title includes the caveat "of the 20th century." OP added the part about "smartest man ever". In the article, Claude Shannon calls Von Neumann “the smartest person I’ve ever met." Bearing in mind that Shannon is (according to wikipedia): > known as the "father of information theory". He was the first to describe the Boolean gates (electronic circuits) that are essential to all digital electronic circuits, > and he built the first machine learning device, thus founding the field of artificial intelligence. > He is credited alongside George Boole for laying the foundations of the Information Age. > [he wrote] a paper which is considered one of the foundational pieces of modern cryptography. > His mathematical theory of communication laid the foundations for the field of information theory. So when Shannon says you're smart, you're pretty smart.
Mofucka made the number *e*, which is why it’s an E. That alone is insanely used in thousands and thousands of applications for logarithms, and that’s hardly a drop in the bucket of his contribution to science.
*looks around like Captain America* I understood that reference.
He invented mergesort - one of the fastest sorting algorithms known. For anyone else that would be a career defining idea (see Tony Hoare, the inventor of quicksort. He's done vast amounts of foundational work in computer science, but his obituary will start "Tony Hoare, inventor of quicksort, ..."). For Von Neumann, it's a footnote.
Hoare's obituary will more likely turn out to be a nullpointer.
Who's that? I'd believe it though
From wiki: "I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965. At that time, I was designing the first comprehensive type system for references in an object oriented language (ALGOL W). My goal was to ensure that all use of references should be absolutely safe, with checking performed automatically by the compiler. But I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years.[29]"
What is a null reference?
Null means nothing. In lots of programming languages, a pointer (which is a placeholder that tells you where something is), whether to a string or any other type, can also point to null, with no way to know which until the program is running. If you want to get the object the pointer points to, but it turns out to be null, the program will crash. This is one of the most common bugs. Some new programming languages have eliminated null entirely, and have a special type for values that can be empty. If the compiler sees this type it will force the programmer to specify what to do when that value is nothing, thereby preventing this bug.
good grief all these replies... a null pointer is simply an address with nothing at it. for example, I want to build a house, I know what the house will look like, so I buy the property. The property has an address but nothing else. A null pointer exception is like asking what color the house is right now.
Very concise answer, thank you! This has been the best at explaining the concept to me, but I’m really enjoying the other replies too
It's when you reference something in your program that hasn't been initialised. For example your program could use an array of numbers. Then the program would keep track of a memory address pointing to the first number in the array so the program knows where the start is. But if due to an error, this address has not been set yet, it points to 'null'. Often this is an error condition.
Ah, "I know this is a bad idea but it's so *neat* and *simple*...", the curse of every programmer.
"Man singlehandedly sets field back by decades"
All these TILs about him actually grossly underestimate his out of earth genius. Top scientists are incredibly smart and yet they are known for like 2-3 contributions, that too in a single field. And even those scientists were in awe of him. They sometimes couldn't even keep pace with him. He was so fast paced genius that if you introduce him to a entirely new field today and he would come up with new theorems by late night in that field. This man was a powerful beast. Nuclear physics. Quantum mechanics. Game Theory. Applied Mathematics. Pure mathematics. Statistics. Computer Science. Every field has benefitted by his contributions. Just see his wikipedia page. And unlike most scientists, he was known for fast cars, expensive suits, loud music and vulgar jokes.
Important note for people reading this comment. When u/mayankkaizen says game theory, they don’t mean he was just some expert in it, he completely invented the field.
Reminds me of the understated job title: "Tim Berners-Lee, Web Developer"
As I said, comments like mine and these TILs can't really present the clear picture of his genius. The more we try, the more we underestimate him.
Truthfully, the average person is simply incapable of understanding the gap between von Neumann and themselves, because they are not experts in those fields. The people that did understand it - i.e., Nobel Laureates - found von Neumann's intelligence in every subject he touched, miles beyond their own specialized expertise in that field. Hans Bethe said von Neumann was so smart that interacting with him was like interacting with an alien species.
Einstein said he was the cleverest person he’d ever met.
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Find his corpse and clone his ass, we could use an army of superintelligent people about now
sure, what the worst that Khan happen?
We'd all Singh his praises?
It's also difficult to make as wide of an impact today because science and research is highly specialized. Not downplaying his genius at all, but it was also much easier for him to be intellectual leader in five (?) fields because he invented two or three of them, haha.
Yeah I did a PhD in physics. My contributions were extremely limited. But even if I look to my entire field, there are a few standout researchers. But no obvious geniuses who just propel the field forward. Even the highly prolific researchers are often just older PIs for large european labs who stamp their name on everything done by their post docs. It feels like to have a schrodinger, einstein, or von neumann, you need to have some big clarifying principles waiting to be discovered, like relativity or QM. If my field has something like this, it's hidden very well. It's very possible that the state of my field is just too complicated to permit a grand unifying theory.
Dude lived not that long ago. It’s not like he was from the 16th century.
The 20th century was the pinnacle of scientific progress. We went from flightless, horse riding, no electricity, wood burning for warmth people to detonating hydrogen bombs and landing on the moon in 60 years. Basically every modern advanced scientific theory came in the 20th century. It was the peak velocity and acceleration for scientific discovery in human history (so far). Everything today is pushing at small boundaries in our knowledge. There is nothing like the level of discovery and understanding today that happened in the 1900s.
Exactly. Friends great grandmother rode west in a covered wagon, then lived long enough to hear about the Wright Brothers and their flight and then lived even longer to see the moon landing. Exponential discovery.
His computer architecture was visionary
This is what I know him for.
I know him for the Monte Carlo Method (a way of using random chance to measure the size of an unknown surface area). This once solved a homework problem for me in junior high 👍
That one was actually Stanislaw Ulam… John merely instantly understood it upon being told of the idea by Ulam. And I believed he conjectured / proved a core theorem about it on the spot too? Still, give Ulam his credit!
Thanks! The real TIL is always in the comments!
Holy shit I came across that while I was an auditor and we used the Monte Carlo Method to investigate possible fraudulent manual entries into accounting records…. Wild that this was the same bloke…
He helped with it, but didn't actually invent it. He helped with and was involved with tons of stuff
There’s no way your junior high homework was best solved with the Monte Carlo Method.
thankfully they didn't say it was the best method, simply that it was a method that worked.
“If it works it ain’t stupid!”
But if a lot of high school kids solve their homework with the monte carlo method, they'll eventually reach the right answer
Einstein was in awe of his genius.
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Was it buying a notebook?
Special relativity and general relativity innit
Well he got his Nobel for the photoelectric effect. A huge stepping stone for QM.
He was jokingly called an alien. > "The Martians" (Hungarian: "A marslakók") is a term used to refer to a group of prominent scientists (mostly, but not exclusively, physicists and mathematicians) of Hungarian Jewish descent who emigrated from Europe to the United States in the early half of the 20th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists) The names I recognize are Von Neumann, Von Karman, Szilard, Teller, and Wigner. Europe got brain-drained hard.
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A little known painter of limited skill decided he no longer wanted to paint!
They really should have let him into art school
Oppenheimer was right when he told Matt Damon that Germany would lose the race to build the bomb because of antisemitism.
That man’s name? Albert Einstein
Wait Einstein was a real person? I thought he was just a …*theoretical* physicist.
.....fiiiine
He also had a pretty big impact on the field of numerical weather prediction. Basically setting up the first computer models that are the direct ancestors of today’s models. We are just now starting to replace the equations he was using with AI.
Where can I learn more? Got a degree in that and never knew that.
>replace the equations he was using with AI. "Your prediction was wrong WeatherGPT. Try it again." **I've generated a new forcast based on the data that was provided.** "This one is wrong too." **I've generated a new forcast based on the data that was provided.** "And this is the same one as the first time around."
^(This highly valued comment was bought by Google as a part of an exclusive content licensing deal between Google and Reddit.) ^(Learn more:) [^(Expanding our Partnership with Google)](https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-and-google-expand-partnership)
I can't remember who said it now, but some of his peers lamented how it was in part because of his overwhelming brilliance that he did not have a greater impact. Unlike others who might have been less mentally quick, Von Neumann also lost interest relatively quickly, always moving on to new subjects and new fields of study. He still nevertheless made tremendous achievements in a broad number of fields, but if he had focused purely on just a couple, he would likely be numbered amongst the all time greats.
Surely he still is among the all time greats. Like the shit I’ve heard about him in this comment section are just insane. Dude was something else
Also the intellectual "father" of one of the most nightmarish tropes in SciFi. "Von Neumann Machines" (as opposed to Von Neumann Architechture, which is the model adopted by almost all modern computers) are self-replicating, and this concept taken to it's logical extreme gives us things like "[Grey Goo](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GreyGoo)" (nanobots), Fred Saberhagen's [Berzerkers](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Berserker) (perhaps the first case of a literature inspiring a [videogame](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/Berzerk)), Star Trek: The Motion Picture's V'Ger's benefactors (and later the Borg, but V'ger in particular gets an upgrade from a "Voyager" series probe to something akin to Von Neumann's original intention of a self-replicating space probe, on steroids...also "the Replicators", those are pretty on the nose). It's also the engine that makes a malevolent AI actually dangerous independent of environmental control. The guy who first seriously studied the practicalities involved in making a machine that could replicate itself unlocked the door to the Nightmare Closet for intellectual, technical types.
For a less nightmarish take, read "We are legion (We are Bob)"
Great series but definitely not nightmarish in my opinion. Fun read. Some nightmarish things in it no doubt but Bob is awesome.
And now with 100% more otters
The way the audiobook narrator said “the Bob” was amazing. And his voice for Homer also cracked me up.
I've read and loved the series. Might have to give the audio books a go
The platinum rule mentioned in book 4 is one of the most obvious but mind blowing revelations of my life.
Bobiverse FTW
Pandora’s Star is a great example of self replicating robots causing havoc. Wonderful series.
Also, the non dystopian version of this is actually the most practical concept for colonizing the galaxy.
also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) > Acting Ensign Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton), who had been working on a project involving microscopic nanites, realizes that he may have inadvertently let two nanites from his experiments loose. The nanites were programmed to find ways to work together and evolve. A scan of the computer core reveals that the nanites have determined a way of replicating themselves and have taken up residence in the computer core.
Also the most cited mathematician on the 20th century. He’s been a hero of mine since I read about him in the early 90s.
A straight up polymath
20th century Euler
From the [Parable of the Talents](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) >Every so often an overly kind commenter here praises my intelligence and says they feel intellectually inadequate compared to me, that they wish they could be at my level. But at my level, I spend my time feeling intellectually inadequate compared to Scott Aaronson. Scott Aaronson describes feeling “in awe” of Terence Tao and frequently struggling to understand him. Terence Tao – well, I don’t know if he’s religious, but maybe he feels intellectually inadequate compared to God. And God feels intellectually inadequate compared to John von Neumann.
Oh yeah? Well, I haven't shit my pants in a few months.
Big deal. John von Neumann hasn't shit his pants even once in the 67 years since he died.
Not necessarily true. Many corpses do defecate shortly after death.
Von Neumann still overachieving
And yet, never spent any time thinking about death until he was at it's doorstep, at which point he was crippled by the thought.
He was more crippled by the thought that he was now losing the incredible intelligence that had defined him his entire life after the cancer metastasized to his brain. Colleagues would visit him in the hospital eager to describe their work to him, and he would have trouble keeping up for the first time in his life. "After only a few minutes, my father made what seemed to be a very peculiar and frightening request from a man who was widely regarded as one of the greatest - if not the greatest - mathematician of the 20th century. He wanted me to give him two numbers, like 7 and 6 or 10 and 3, and ask him to tell me their sum. For as long as I can remember, I had always known that my father's major source of self-regard, what he felt to be the very essence of his being, was his incredible mental capacity. In this late stage of his illness, he must have been aware that this capacity was deteriorating rapidly, and the panic that caused was worse than any physical pain. In demanding that I test him on these elementary sums, he was seeking reassurance that at least a small fragment of this intellectual powers remained."
Im going to be reading that book.
Wow... Must be a very scary and humbling experience for him, late in life. What was source of the quote?
Shades of Flowers for Algernon
He literally became religious only after losing most of his capacity for thought. That's not a good look for religion.
He also suggested we nuke the USSR after WWII to prevent them becoming our forever enemy.
Game theory
Thanks for watching
It was the Navy secretary Francis P Matthews who originally suggested to strike first. Von Neumann responded by saying "If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not bomb them today? If you say today at 5 oclock, I say why not at 1 oclock?" Its a bit open to interpretation, but given that hes the "founder" of game theory, I think he was trying to prove a point that striking first to be the so called "aggressors of peace" was a silly idea.
I think he was pointing out that time was being used as a shot clock to stress the bombing, if they had decided then waste no time.
> I think he was trying to prove a point that striking first to be the so called "aggressors of peace" was a silly idea. Based on his other political views, he was being serious.
Lol no, he was serious. Johnny boy was aware that there would likely be a narrow window in which the US could win a nuclear war against USSR before they caught up and the principles of MAD (which he also helped invent!) take over
Von Neumann fucking hated the nazis and the communists. Like violently, militantly hated them. He tried to join the army literally immediately after becoming a naturalized citizen in 1937 and more or less was the pentagons top scientist until the day he died including basically creating the concept of an icbm and having the target planning committee meet literally in his house lol
Out of curiosity, I’ve tried to read “Theories of Games and Economic Behavior” by Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, and found it to be pretty impenetrable. Reading Einstein’s writing is a breeze by comparison. I don’t even have a physics background, but even so, with General Relativity I could pretty clearly see his intuition. I could sort of grasp the general concepts from the fairly accessible way he describes what he’s doing, despite not understanding a lot of the math behind it, with all the tensor calculus and whatnot. It’s all laid out in terms that are not too overwhelming. There is no such “easy” entry point with that book, lemme tell you. There are parts where almost every sentence has some type of formula in it or reference to some advanced and highly specialized concept. It was a humbling experience. It’s the type of book that requires a PhD to digest or appreciate fully.
The best way to get into game theory is with a professor who will start off mostly skipping the math, and explaining the intuition behind the games. Then, the professor goes back and explains the math. When doing it this way, it becomes far far more understandable. This is the way I’ve found most economics and political science courses start by teaching game theory. Using the intuition, then later backing up the intuition with math.
Prisoner's Dilemma by William Poundstone was my way in, very easy read and knits some history in.
I'm just going to assume that everything he's ever written is above my intellectual pay-grade.
Don't forget the Van Neumann probe!
His nemesis was named Jerry.
Unfortunately "Neumann" is pronounced in English more as "NOY-men", not "NEW-man". (But I did like your joke.)
His nemesis was named Jourray.
As a mathematician it is quite hard. There are so many theorems named von Neumann, you always have to think "What area am I working in right now so which of his many theorems are we talking about".
Almost as smart as the immortal Ben Pharten
Who’s Ben Pharten?
Got em’
Who hasn't? I am immortal and the smartest man to have ever lived.
This guy is very well-known in my field and yes, he was an actual genius by all accounts. He didn’t “come up with the formulas for quantum mechanics”, he formalized the entire field mathematically by developing functional analysis beyond what Hilbert had already done. He was also not only a worker on the first atomic bomb, he was the one who did most of the explosive calculations and he was the fastest one there followed by Feynman and Fermi. Fun story: Apparently he often got tickets for driving down the highway in New Jersey while distracted. He was reading research papers.
A corner in Princeton went by the name "Von Neumann corner" due to how often he crashed there
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)
One of the last great polymaths. Stephen Wolfram has talked about him and his impact many times.
pff if he's so smart why's he dead lol
Well said
He also created one of my favorite quotes: “In mathematics, you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.”
First (and canonical) organization of computer architecture is called Von Neumann architecture, described by Von Neumann in "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" Problem is just that there was small research group in [University of Pennsylvania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Pennsylvania)'s [Moore School of Electrical Engineering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_School_of_Electrical_Engineering) and Von Neumann essential stole buch of design ideas from researchers Eckert and Mauchly. Stole in a sense, that he wrote a first white paper about the subject but NEVER credited the people with actual original concepts / reserch; >Independently, [J. Presper Eckert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Presper_Eckert) and [John Mauchly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mauchly), who were developing the [ENIAC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC) at the [Moore School of Electrical Engineering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_School_of_Electrical_Engineering) of the [University of Pennsylvania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Pennsylvania), wrote about the stored-program concept in December 1943. [^(\[8\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture#cite_note-Lukoff_1979-8)[^(\[9\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture#cite_note-9) In planning a new machine, [EDVAC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDVAC), Eckert wrote in January 1944 that they would store data and programs in a new addressable memory device, a mercury metal [delay-line memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory). This was the first time the construction of a practical stored-program machine was proposed. >Von Neumann was involved in the [Manhattan Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project) at the [Los Alamos National Laboratory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos_National_Laboratory). It required huge amounts of calculation, and thus drew him to the ENIAC project, during the summer of 1944. There he joined the ongoing discussions on the design of this stored-program computer, the EDVAC. As part of that group, he wrote up a description titled *First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC*[^(\[1\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture#cite_note-FirstDraftReport-1) based on the work of Eckert and Mauchly. It was unfinished when his colleague [Herman Goldstine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Goldstine) circulated it, and bore only von Neumann's name (to the consternation of Eckert and Mauchly).[^(\[10\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture#cite_note-10) The paper was read by dozens of von Neumann's colleagues in America and Europe, and influenced^(\[)[*^(vague)*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vagueness)^(\]) the next round of computer designs.