121–130 of 282 posts
Lets speculate this is entirely nurture. How do you get as smart as von Neumann? Zettelkasten?
Von Neumann did it by watching loads of Khan Academy videos on YouTube, taking regular Vitamin D supplements, using Anki cards and practicing mindfulness meditation.
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Most people who have a lot of things named after then wanted to have a lot of things named after them. Consider: why is more named after von Neumann then Erdos?
Compared https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Joh... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Pau... Seems more or less a tie to me. [0] Especially compared to this chap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Car... [0] Actually, it's not a tie: If you add the entries on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conjectures_by_Paul_Er... you get a clear winner.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I heard or read a story from Freeman Dyson about a somewhat legendary conference where von Neumann was to present his version of Hilbert's problems, presumably about the new computing age, I think at the IAS. It was highly anticipated, but Dyson and everybody else present were shocked because von Neumann was in a state of advanced mental decline when he presented it, and people there agreed to pretend it hadn't happe…
This is probably the story in page 220 of [1], beginning at "Von Neumann got into trouble at the end of his life because he was really a frog but everyone expected him to fly like a bird.". [1] http://www.uvm.edu/pdodds/files/papers/others/2009/dyson2009...
I often use von Neumann's quote, "Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.", to console myself when I have to read a math book multiple times to really understand something. The quote also has truth in it. I had no problem accepting that 0! = 1 only because I learnt that fact early in school. However, I struggled quite a bit to accept that span({}) = {0}, even though it is not…
0! = 1 is not hard to accept, since it follows a rule. You just need to look at it backwards. To get the previous factorial (Ni-1)! you need to divide the N! by N 4! = 24 ;; 24 / 4 = 6 3! = 6 ;; 6 / 3 = 2 2! = 2 ;; 2 / 2 = 1 1!= 1 ;; 1 / 1 = 1 0! = 1
> von Neumann proposed a description for a computer architecture now known as the von Neumann architecture Well, he actually described an already existing design by Eckert and Mauchly under his name and this paper was illegally disclosed. For the ones interested in this and other fascinating stories about ENIAC, here is a good book: https://www.amazon.com/Eniac-Triumphs-Tragedies-Worlds-Compu... ; worth reading is al…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still a semi-positive outcome no? Computers becoming cheaper?
J. Presper Eckert (the Eckert in "Eckert & Mauchly") in his oral history interview [1], p.46f: > "Originally we called ENIAC the "MANIAC" when it didn't work right. And later they borrowed that name for some other actual machine. But if you worked for von Neumann on the MANIAC, then if you invented something it belonged to you. Well, on some relatively short notice, like it might have been a week, or a month, or some…
There is absolutely no doubt that without this publication and with a patent claiming the design of a computer with stored program, the evolution of the computers would have been much slower.
Whoever pushed the report to be published did a huge service to everybody else but Eckert and Mauchly.
Also, Eckert and his coworkers were deluded if they thought they could have gained anything by having a patent on the stored-program computer.
Nobody prevented them to build good computers even without a patent, but they did not have the intellectual and financial resources to do much until they were bought by Remington Rand, which lead to the introduction of UNIVAC in 1951.
If they had a patent, the result would have been that Remington Rand would have had a monopoly on the computer market, with inferior products, and all the great advances in computers that have been done in other places, like NIST, MIT or IBM, would have happened only many years later.
I have read both the von Neumann report, which is a model of clarity, and all the early documents that remain from Eckert, Mauchly et al.
It is likely that they already had some ideas about stored-program computers, but there is no doubt that their ideas were very confused.
Von Neumann distinguished what was right from what was wrong in their ideas, then clarified, organized and completed all those concepts and synthesized them in a coherent theory that could be easily understood and used by anyone else.
The contribution of von Neumann is much more important than Eckert tries to imply.
Moreover, while Eckert and al. were upset that their own contributions were not acknowledged as well as they should have been, they also failed to acknowledge the important ideas about electronic computers that they themselves have taken from Atanasoff, without ever mentioning him.
Unlike Eckert and al., but like von Neumann, Atanasoff was also someone able to express very clearly his concepts, so you could easily learn from him. For example a report about the classification of computer memories, written by Atanasoff at the beginning of WWII, was extremely advanced for those days (Atanasoff invented what is now called DRAM).
"Anybody who looks at living organisms knows perfectly well that they can produce other organisms like themselves. This is their normal function, they wouldn’t exist if they didn’t do this, and it’s not plausible that this is the reason why they abound in the world. In other words, living organisms are very complicated aggregations of elementary parts, and by any reasonable theory of probability or thermodynamics hig…
In this I disagree with von Neumann. The relevant phrase to understand my point of departure is "That which persists exists." There is a continuum of strategies for persistence and reproduction is only one of them. While thermodynamics over a large enough timescale dictates even disorder, over shorter timescales and in specific local it allows for the temporary increase in order. This is no more or less probable than…
> von Neumann proposed a description for a computer architecture now known as the von Neumann architecture Well, he actually described an already existing design by Eckert and Mauchly under his name and this paper was illegally disclosed. For the ones interested in this and other fascinating stories about ENIAC, here is a good book: https://www.amazon.com/Eniac-Triumphs-Tragedies-Worlds-Compu... ; worth reading is al…
How come it's known as "von Neumann" architecture?
The Eckert group had some rather vague ideas about the architecture of their future computer, the successor of ENIAC, and those ideas certainly included some kind of stored program (not necessarily stored in the same memory as the data; stored programs were not new, as they were common in mechanical or electromechanical computers).
However the Eckert group was secretive, because they hoped to start after the war their own company to make computers and become rich, so it is not known for sure how much von Neumann learned from them and how much of what von Neumann wrote were his own ideas.
In any case, I am more grateful to von Neumann than to the Eckert group, because all the other more important computer projects have started from the von Neumann report, while the work of Eckert and al. had quite a little influence.
The ENIAC computer was very important only as a demonstration that it is possible to make very fast electronic computers, otherwise it had much less influence on the structure of computers than the many other slower computers made around that time.