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The legend of John von Neumann (1973)

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Re: The legend of John von Neumann (1973)

#31

Post by irremediable »

jerf wrote: post #12
irremediable wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The famous quote is "His ex-wife reportedly testified that on several occasions when she unwittingly disturbed either his calculus or his drums he flew into a violent rage, during which time he attacked her, threw pieces of bric-a-brac about and smashed the furniture." That was from an FBI file ( https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/fbi... ) on Feynman. I don't know anything about the "paid aborti…

"It's tricky stuff... Feynman was (is?) a hero of mine, and I struggle to put this stuff in context." Heros have feet of clay. The correct move is to adjust your concept of "hero" to include this. The alternative, that you will only declare someone a "hero" if they are perfect in every way yields a definition of "hero" with 0 instances, which is a useless definition. If Feynmann was abusive to his wife to some degree…

I half-agree with you, but isn't there an ethical line past which it's wrong to call someone a hero?

Re: The legend of John von Neumann (1973)

#32

Post by [deleted] »

dragonwriter wrote: post #23
acheron wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not disagreeing with you necessarily, but the 70s were hardly an economic boom time in the USA either.

OTOH, the time when Lisp (1958), Smalltalk (1969), and ML (1973 is what Wikipedia has for "first appeared in", but unlike Lisp and and Smalltalk I can't find information on definition vs. release) were first defined all (except the last, which is on the cusp) precede the 1973 recession, and the preceding period actually was an economic boom time.

[deleted]

Re: The legend of John von Neumann (1973)

#33

Post by laichzeit0 »

I'm surprised this article doesn't mention his language abilities.

Since the age of six, von Neumann was fluent in Latin and ancient Greek. He also read (and remembered completely) all the major works of antiquity.

As someone who's been struggling with Latin and Greek for over 10 years it completely breaks my spirit to know that for someone else it was so effortless.

Re: The legend of John von Neumann (1973)

#34

Post by darkmighty »

Radim wrote: post #6
jnazario wrote: post #2

John von Neumann was an absolutely amazing human and scientist. truly a genius, a polymath, and evidently quite an interesting party guest. the book Prisoner's Dilemma is ostensibly about game theory but it's set within the context of von Neumann's life. really quite fascinating, one of my favorite people to study. http://www.amazon.com/Prisoners-Dilemma-William-Poundstone/d...

Not to rain on the parade, but such glorification of "heroes" is... just awkward. Wasn't there an article on Herbert's Dune on the HN front page, just yesterday? In particular, von Neumann was an "amazing human" as long as you don't mind him advising the military to bomb Russia out of the map, preemptively. What a wonderfully humane move. "If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today a…

That's not what is being discussed here -- what's in point are his wonderful mathematical prowess, not his principles. Being good at one thing doesn't imply pristine ethics.

You also have to remember that those figures have pretty much all they ever said scrutinized, so that tends to distort things -- I'm pretty sure everyone one time or another made some unethical remarks, specially as a WWII fugitive. Horrible things happened in Europe and after that the harshness of Stalinism was also clear. I think it wouldn't be hard to get caught in "ultra-Americanism" at the time.

Re: The legend of John von Neumann (1973)

#35

Post by tachyonbeam »

darkmighty wrote: post #27
acheron wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not disagreeing with you necessarily, but the 70s were hardly an economic boom time in the USA either.

And von Neumann lived mostly though war and 30's financial crisis. I honestly think it's more a question of (lack of) will/confidence from part of academia. I bet if had really good ideas about new languages and really wanted to dig deep on that he would be able to do so without starving. Maryam Mirzakhani (this year's female fields Medalist) commented that she's quite a slow thinker, and left a clear impression that…

My understanding is that during the war, the american government was throwing money around liberally. Trying to do everything it could to outwit and outdo the enemy. This is part of what caused the post-war economic boom, money being distributed and more people getting a chance to prosper.

Re: The legend of John von Neumann (1973)

#37

Post by Chinjut »

yohanatan wrote: post #36

Gödel did not prove that mathematics could not 'be proved consistent'. He proved that particular axiomatic systems cannot be both complete and consistent.

Presumably, the reference is to Goedel's second incompleteness theorem, rather than the first incompleteness theorem. (One might still quibble with phrasing it in this way, of course)

Re: The legend of John von Neumann (1973)

#38

Post by CurtMonash »

"Hungarian is not exactly a lingua franca" Hard to argue with that part. :)

Anyhow, a colleague of mine at PaineWebber sadly came down with schizophrenic delusions, and concluded that he and I were illegitimate children of Norbert Weiner, while Jack Grubman and Andy Kessler had been sired by John von Neumann. I objected strenuously; as somebody whose PhD these was a special case of the min-max theorem for zero-sum games, I thought it only fitting that I be on the von Neumann side of the ledger.

Re: The legend of John von Neumann (1973)

#39

Post by Cyph0n »

a3n wrote: post #26
Cyph0n wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the same happened to me. I believe it was the thermonuclear bomb and the Von Neumann architecture. I thought that it couldn't be the same guy - two entirely unrelated fields - but it was. The guy was, in my opinion at least, the last true polymath.

Except they're not unrelated. Von Neumann needed more computing power than he had available, for studying bomb blasts. Not only did he and colleagues largely create digital computers, but he marshaled the resources of the US government and academia to get it done. Dyson's Turing's Cathedral is a fascinating account of the development of digital computers. The early ones were amazingly physical, using wave propagation…

Wow. Really cool stuff. I'll be sure to check out the book then.

Re: The legend of John von Neumann (1973)

#40

Post by coliveira »

slg wrote: post #4

I wonder if a person like this came along today, whether they would be allowed to have the same type of impact in the variety of different ways that John von Neumann did. Whether he was advancing economic theory or telling the military the most efficient altitude to detonate a bomb, it was all the same basic skill set. He was just a crazy smart and logical guy and he applied that to every field that he could. I can't…

The opportunity still exists, but it is not in the obvious places, like computer science or physics. Great thinkers gravitate to fields that are starting right now, where there is a lot of basic work to do. Computer science is in many ways a mature field. Of course, there is always the possibility of something new and exciting appearing, as it happens in physics and mathematics from time to time. We don't know that it is right now, it will only be clear 10 to 20 years later.
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