Can anyone recommend readings on von Neumann that highlight his non-mathematical achievements? Obviously he was primarily a physicist and mathematician, but for a non-mathematician, the long list of academic publications is hard to interpret and appreciate. For example, more in the vein of these: - Reportedly, von Neumann possessed an eidetic memory, and so was able to recall complete novels and pages of the phone di…
> Reportedly, von Neumann possessed an eidetic memory, and so was able to recall complete novels and pages of the phone directory on command. This enabled him to accumulate an almost encyclopedic knowledge of what ever he read If he was able to recall ~entire pages of the phone directory on command, I wonder if he could also recall (near) verbatim text of all the novels he had ever read, to what degree he could do th…
Given that he could be occasionally absent minded, I suspect that it had to be something that piqued his interest, but his sense of what was interesting was extremely broad.
He did in fact speculate on the workings of the brain in The Computer and the Brain, which is based on a lecture series he had planned out but did not deliver. It was more in the context of automata theory, but as someone with an interest in AI, automata, and neuroscience, it was frankly rather dank[0]. A lot of the pioneering work was, and is enjoyable in part because it's original and speculative, so you don't have to master the literature to make sense of it, you can just pick a paper and go. I'd recommend reading Pitts and McCullogh, plus also Lettvin, but others might have some equally lit[1] recommendations.
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0. In the contemporary sense, c.f. "cool", "dope", or "excellent"; not dank like a root cellar.
1. vide supra