Some strange political beliefs but indeed an unparalleled genius. (He advocated for immediately nuking the USSR!) His faculty with infinite series and other mathematical tricks was rather amazing.
> He advocated for immediately nuking the USSR! Considering the oppression that his native country experienced at the hands of the USSR, and the fact that the implications of nuking an entire country weren't really understood yet at that point, this view is hardly surprising.
Always in awe to read about assemblies of great minds like at Princeton's IAS. Does another such assembly exist today? I don't think it does but want to know if others can point to one. Did it happen then because the discoveries were "low hanging" enough that they would be found eventually, such that today we've basically exhausted the major discoverable parts of nature given human limitations, like a depleting orebo…
I’ve already linked it in this comment thread, but it seems related here as well (no affiliation):
Regarding the coining of entropy is just an example of the creative genius of Von Neumann: When Shannon first derived his famous formula for information, he asked von Neumann what he should call it and von Neumann replied “You should call it entropy for two reasons: first because that is what the formula is in statistical mechanises but second and more important, as nobody knows what entropy is, whenever you use the…
Funny you mention that story, I came across it for the first time about 3 days ago in a book I was reading -- Grammatical Man. It's one of the best reads I've found on the history of information theory. Funnily enough the friend that lent it to me isn't even a tech person, he's an electrician who's more interested in occultism and esotericism than mathematics and technology.
Every time I read about the 20th century history of computing, it sounds like it was a wild time. Every advance or discovery seems to have some humorous anecdote attached to it.
Is it just me or does it seem like there something like there were a lot of celebrity-level STEM heroes to come out of the early 20th century. These folks all seemed to work together closely. Maybe these things take time, but it just doesn't seem like there is anything remotely like this going on today, despite far greater access to education and increases in global population. Is it perhaps that the limelight is les…
It was a much smaller field back then. Reading about computing in the 70's (especially ARPANET), the same handful of names keep popping up.
Also, they may be celebrities to us. But ask the average person who John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Edsger Dijkstra, or Paul Erdős was, and they'll probably have no idea.
Can someone please explain why this is being downvoted? That is true, “martians” were all Jewish and Ashkenazi Jews have high percentage of high IQ representatives compared to other ethnic groups.
It's quite controversial to study the IQ of different racial groups, mostly because of history (the racists of the 19th and 20th century were fascinated with racial differences) and because it can be used as a weapon by racist groups and right or wrong it feels a bit like a politically incorrect or even a racist thing to do (I'm not passing a judgment on race/IQ studies, just saying why scientists may steer away). As…
Well, I think it is interesting to study it, as well as it can further our knowledge on areas that can’t really be ethically researched.
Also, it can also further our medical knowledge, for example Ashkenazi Jews do have more neurological problems, which may explain their higher IQs on average.
But I do agree that the results should be used sparingly (but it can’t be helped. Bad people will say what they want about a given race without any truth)
> we still have no idea what biologically separates a man like this from the rest of us I don't think it was a biological separation. Neumann, and his brilliant peers, all grew up in Hungary in the midst of political and ethnic oppression with significant economic and language barriers to overcome. Books have been written about it, and I can't accurately recount the facts. But it seems to me that what separates him a…
I think you are confusing von Neumann with someone else, because that is not the case, at all. He grew up in a wealthy family which was ennobled by the emperor when he was 10 (hence the von ), and spoke Hungarian natively. In childhood he was taught by governesses in numerous major European languages before going to a Christian school for the Hungarian elite, while receiving private tutoring from a renowned mathemati…
As I said "I can't accurately recount the facts", but Hungary was definitely not a country of privilege at really any time in it's history, much less the late 1800s and the early 1900s. The facts of Neumann's own life may have been much more fortunate than his country of birth. That is something I don't know much about. But I would imagine, no matter how privileged his life was, the fact that he was born in a country that was oppressed by a foreign superpower, lived through a holocaust of his ethnic group, and spoke Hungarian as his first language in a world dominated by German and English, shaped who he was.
Reading stories like this, makes me certain that one of the biggest breakthroughs the human race will achieve is when we cure cancer. Our progress will start increasing even more. Imagine what our world would look like if the average person lived to over 90 and was still mentally sharp. Imagine an additional 40 years of Neumann, 20 years of Einstein, even from the more modern times also, Steve Jobs or my personal fav…
It is a dark view, but I’m not sure the general population living longer would be necessary beneficial to society. But it has more to do with all the implicit propaganda around us and the flaws of democracy. And that older people seem to have a more rigid world view. So all I’m saying is that we have to understand the human brain’s psychology as it gets older.
Genocide is about destruction of a people not simply large numbers of deaths. The Holocaust is the model people assume, but China’s current genocide of the Uyghur is genocide based on intent even without large scale slaughter. Now you might be overestimating the US nuclear arsenal at the time, remember he died in 1957. At the time a nuclear exchange could have killed a lot of people, but only on the scale of a major…
In 1961 the Pentagon's own estimates gave the expected casualties at 600 million plus when it had ~20K weapons. In 1950 the US had ~2500 weapons so scaling that back proportionally still looks like 10s of millions dead. Edit: I suspect maximum lethality of the US stockpile would have been during the 1960s when they still used large numbers of very large and dirty weapons.
1961 the US had ICBM’s and large numbers of vastly more powerful Hydrogen bombs and very accurate targeting methods. In 1950 the US was still limited to long range bombers, many or even most of which would get shot down and so they would have concentrated on the most critical military targets.
Thus, even 10 million dead in 1950 seems very high unless they simply tried to maximize civilian casualties which it’s self would reasonably qualify as genocide. And again Russia lost ~27 million people in WWII and it isn’t considered a genocide of Russia so numbers alone while horrific don’t qualify.
He was beyond a brilliant person, of that is no doubt. And not in anyway trying to take away from that fact, reading the following excerpt from the article..; "[..] von Neumann both worked alongside and collaborated with some of the foremost figures of twentieth century science. He went to high school with Eugene Wigner, collaborated with Hermann Weyl at ETH, attended lectures by Albert Einstein in Berlin, worked und…
"Work with the smartest people who will work with you" has become one of the pieces of career advice I give myself.