How do you feel about posting the most Bengali thing I've ever seen on reddit?

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nice, for a second i thought you were going to say von neumann was racist but thankfully it was the opposite. also i'll check out the later

Was hoping someone would ask this so thanks. As I mentioned in the post, I came across the name first in high school. Then again at university. I was studying physics but an old friend, who was studying economics, was besotted with game theory. In the 15 years or so I was in science journalism, his name kept popping up more and more often but in wildly different contexts… interpretations of quantum mechanics (more interest in that because of quantum computing), nuclear strategy, internet commerce, AI etc So one day I just pulled a bunch of random pop science books off my shelf at home (eg Chaos, Consciousness Explained etc) and I found he was in the index of about half. I read the biography by Macrae but it doesn’t really engage with the science so I thought there must be some book that tells me what von Neumann did that means he’s getting talked about so much. It was fascinating to me that a mathematician could have so much impact outside maths. Most popular maths books and bios tell you about how great maths is for its own sake, but here was a mathematician taking on really big real world questions. I don’t read scientific biography much though I liked A Beautiful Mind (the book NOT the film) and American Prometheus so I deliberately set out to write about von Neumann ideas, lacing bits of his life story through that and adding historical context, and a bit about von Neumann’s interactions with others when relevant (like John Nash). So, for the record, it was never meant to be a standard biography. Some people felt cheated by that, some love it. I wrote a book about a mathematical genius that I’d want to read, which takes his ideas seriously. I’ve wanted to write a book since I was like 5 and I’d had ideas before. Many years ago I pitched a book about the hygiene hypothesis to a respected agent and was snubbed. Several years later Ed Yong wrote a book along the lines of the one I pitched (though he did a much better job of it than I could have). So with the von Neumann book, when publishers were interested I thought—it’s now or never…

What made you want to write about him?

And of course there’s a lot more to higher maths than doing big sums in your head! But still-impressive.

Oh. Here’s something else I learned that surprised me to an extent. An economics prof pointed this out to me (sadly) after he read the book. Princeton was incredibly racist in von Neumann’s day but von Neumann championed David Blackwell, when most others would not. This raised von Neumann, the man as opposed to the mathematician, to new heights for me when I was told about it. There’s a nice blog post on Blackwell which mentions the impact of this on him: https://stat.illinois.edu/news/2020-07-17/david-h-blackwell-profile-inspiration-and-perseverance

It is. I didn’t know that I must admit. So perhaps Gauss could outdo von Neumann in feats of mental gymnastics… one thing I meant to say, comparing the two -it’s von Neumann’s impact on our modern lives I find so amazing. By formalising utility theory -giving us a way to compare and measure human happiness-that’s shaped the way we think about ourself today for better or worse. Neoliberalism sprung directly from that idea. And I think there’s a tendency to view ourselves as these happiness optimising machines. Or maybe that’s just me…

Yes that’s right. He spends a chapter talking about her ideas

I heard Gauss could add and multiply 20 digits in his head, could solve equations in his head no different from writing on the board, whereas neumann at best could multiply/add 8 to 10 digits. Although just working memory(can't gauge the rest abilities as they are a bit abstract), that's a pretty huge difference tho?

Gosh. Again I have to say ‘define smart’. But it’s a great comparison. Gauss was a brilliant mathematician who made important fundamental contributions to physics so it’s very apt. I’m biased of course but.., In terms of sheer brain power, von Neumann. In the breadth of his contributions-von Neumann. Von Neumann’s problem was he left so much unfinished-he’d just innovate and move on. So Gauss superior. Not qualified to compare their contributions to pure maths

I learned that he was a romantic. Don’t believe me? You can hear his letter to his second wife, Klara Dan, during the second season of the Lost Women of Science podcast. I don’t have it to hand but the intensity of it is something else Take a listen (the series is great) https://www.lostwomenofscience.org/season-2

I wish I could give you a good answer on this, but in my own experience I’ve never had the conversation come up or seen evidence of them.

My understanding is that while they did exist at one point as a fringe part of movie making, they are almost non existent now. Only one I heard of was an Italian film but it’s name escapes me.

Yes I wish she was encouraged to publish her von Neumann work in a physics journal. In any case, I was quite impressed to see her show up in Heisenberg's Physics and Beyond (I think that was the book) as a someone Heisenberg found worthy to write about, and discuss her ideas seriously.

Shout out to julian Bigelow late of 3 hornor lane Princeton nj!!!

Von Neumann in a suit and tie. Feynman in a t-shirt. Classic.

I definitely think there's something in that. But the physicists of the 20s and 30s were far more interested in 'philosophical' issues and interpretation of QM than physicists now, though it's making a bit of a come back in certain circles.

Hermann did prepare the way with an essay which she sent to Bohr, heisenberg and others--and we know that Heisenberg and
von Weizsäcker read it, and met with her to discuss the essay. but her criticism of the 'no hidden variables' proof was just a small part of that essay and the resulting paper. She didn't seem to attach that much importance to it herself. There was a lot of sexism obviously but it's a mark of Hermann's intellect that she overcame even that and was taken very seriously.

But yes, she first published her thoughts in Abhandlugen der Fries’schen Schule, which was philosophy. When she was asked to send an edited version to Die Naturwissenschaften, which would certainly have been read widely by scientits, she left her criticism of von Neumann out....

Well he was blessed with a photographic memory. So he read a 10 volume history of the world in German when he was a kid and could recite pages verbatim in his 40s! I think he enjoyed military history a fair bit (he read the history of the Peloponnesian Wars) and war games. This probably played into his later interest in games and explains partly why he formulated game theory. Like a lot of mathematicians at the time, they wondered whether maths could help bring peace. They hoped they could use maths to resolve conflicts. Emanuel Lasker, chess grandmaster and a pupil of Hilbert, said the institutes dedicated to the 'science of contest' would ‘breed teachers capable of elevating the multitude from its terrible dilettantism’ in matters of negotiation, transforming politics completely, and ‘aid the progress and the happiness of all humankind’.

He also loved reading novels-Dickens, for example-he was able to recite huge chunks of A Tale of Two Cities. But really he seemed to live and breathe maths, outside the time he spent driving badly at speed and partying.

One of his main blind spots was...himself. He didn't keep a diary though you get some glimpes of the man through his copious letters (his love letters to Klara Dan are remarkable!). But even here, he'll be talking about current affairs, then veer off into a 6 page maths proof! I don't think he was given to analysing his own feelings much...

the one thing i will always remember about von neumann is that von neumann architecture means "programs stored in memory". my computer hardware prof verbally beat this idea into us and said that if we don't remember it on graduation day he'd take away our diploma.

question: what's the most unexpected thing someone could learn about von neumann?

You might like this photo https://twitter.com/Ananyo/status/1438483690640785413?s=20&t=g2IGfKeMrZCUTOYum6IpWg

The guy was still writing incredible lectures on his deathbed! He would have been unstoppable. He was taking an interest in molecular biology too in the '50s. It was a huge loss that cancer took him so early.

Von Neumann's contributions are incredible. But much like Turinf, died relatively young in his early 50s. If he had lived as long as, say, Einstein, would he of kept up such an incredible pace of contributions to humanity?

>When was the decade when JvN was most productive?

This one's really difficult. Unlike Einstein, von Neumann remained productive throughout his whole life--even writing an influential lecture series on his deathbed! But the 1930s were incredible. During that decade, he published his book establishing the rigorous mathematical foundations of quantum mechanis (still definitive), explored the non-linear dynamics of explosions (which would later lead him to his decisive contribution to the Manhattan Project), proved his version of the ergodic theorem, began exploring rings of operators (now known as von Neumann algebras) with 3 monumental papers... (he also bribed a driving test examiner in Princeton to get a license)

His rings of operators are probably his most profound contribution to pure maths. As Freeman Dyson wrote: ‘Exploring the ocean of rings of operators, he found new continents that he had no time to survey in detail. He intended one day to publish a grand synthesis of his work on rings of operators. The grand synthesis remains an unwritten masterpiece, like
the eighth symphony of Sibelius.’

Still von Neumann managed to write 7 papers totalling 500 pages on them! The mathematician Vaughan Jones was awarded the Fields Medal for his work on the mathematics of knots, which emerged from his study of Type II von Neumann algebras. And Carlo Rovelli and Alain Connes used Type III factors in their effort to solve the ‘problem of time’: that though we feel time to flow ‘forwards’, there is no single
unified explanation for why this is so (quantum theory and general relativity, for example, have radically different concepts of time).

But I'd have to choose the 40s for their incredible impact: the von Neumann architecture, the conversion of the ENIAC into the first modern stored program computer, the work on the Manhattan project, his work to aid the US and the secret mission to help the British Navy, the first ever computer simulations, Monte Carlo method with Ulam, the first modern computer program with his wife Klara Dan, the IAS computer project--which with its widely circulated progress reports spawned the first generation of modern computers including IBM's first commercial computer, and, as a hobby, he invented modern game theory with Morgenstern.

Incidentally, for more on Klara Dan von Neumann, might I humbly recommend:

https://engelsbergideas.com/portraits/klara-dan-esoteric-intellect-who-wrote-the-first-modern-computer-code/

and

https://www.lostwomenofscience.org/season-2

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Richard Feynman was also a smooth operator