What do you think?
Rate this book
The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann
The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Nuclear weapons and self-replicating spacecrafts. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable, yet largely overlooked, man: John von Neumann.
Born in Budapest at the turn of the century, von Neumann is one of the most influential scientists to have ever lived. A child prodigy, he mastered calculus by the age of eight, and in high school made lasting contributions to mathematics. In Germany, where he helped lay the foundations of quantum mechanics, and later at Princeton, von Neumann’s colleagues believed he had the fastest brain on the planet—bar none. He was instrumental in the Manhattan Project and the design of the atom bomb; he helped formulate the bedrock of Cold War geopolitics and modern economic theory; he created the first ever programmable digital computer; he prophesized the potential of nanotechnology; and, from his deathbed, he expounded on the limits of brains and computers—and how they might be overcome.
Taking us on an astonishing journey, Ananyo Bhattacharya explores how a combination of genius and unique historical circumstance allowed a single man to sweep through a stunningly diverse array of fields, sparking revolutions wherever he went. The Man from the Future is an insightful and thrilling intellectual biography of the visionary thinker who shaped our century.
Born in Budapest at the turn of the century, von Neumann is one of the most influential scientists to have ever lived. A child prodigy, he mastered calculus by the age of eight, and in high school made lasting contributions to mathematics. In Germany, where he helped lay the foundations of quantum mechanics, and later at Princeton, von Neumann’s colleagues believed he had the fastest brain on the planet—bar none. He was instrumental in the Manhattan Project and the design of the atom bomb; he helped formulate the bedrock of Cold War geopolitics and modern economic theory; he created the first ever programmable digital computer; he prophesized the potential of nanotechnology; and, from his deathbed, he expounded on the limits of brains and computers—and how they might be overcome.
Taking us on an astonishing journey, Ananyo Bhattacharya explores how a combination of genius and unique historical circumstance allowed a single man to sweep through a stunningly diverse array of fields, sparking revolutions wherever he went. The Man from the Future is an insightful and thrilling intellectual biography of the visionary thinker who shaped our century.
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2021
About the author
Ananyo Bhattacharya
5 books78 followersAnanyo Bhattacharya holds a PhD in biophysics from Imperial College London and has worked as a science correspondent at the Economist, an editor at Nature, and a medical researcher at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in San Diego, California. He lives in London.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 295 reviews
February 9, 2023
Folks, I'm so hot right now I feel like I've been shoving hot tamales up the devil's own incontinent pisshole while performing capsaicin kegels, peaking at around 2.2 million dilutions of sugar water (i.e. Scoville Heat Units). Additionally: some impromptu high-performance liquid chromatography to analytically quantify cooter capsaicinoids content in order to obviate the possibility of user error. (sensory fatigue being a real issue when the wet placenta of a giant Carolina reaper is stuffed in your nakadashi). That subjective organoleptic tests have largely been superseded by analytical methods such as HPLC is perhaps no surprise when you consider the number of people who have killed themselves by sticking bulbs of cotton soaked with Bhut Jolokia juice up their keisters (citation needed) and transformed the considerable number of capsaicin receptors in their anus into an Amorphophallus Titanum (i.e. Corpse Flower) with giant dermal lesions for thorns which no milk enema can prune. This is roughly equivalent to having a can of bear mace detonate inside the distal end of your alimentary canal while you're taking a test on conformal mappings and the Poincare model of non-Euclidean geometry, Cauchy-Goursat theorem and Cauchy integral formula, and so on (ie. etcetera), which sounds like Cthulhu shitting himself underwater, causing everyone in the class (including the professor, who is a militant anti-theist) to pivot two shitty cameras on a slow-ass gimbal (i.e. break their goddamn necks trying to figure out who stepped on Satan's duck) and all murmur in unison, "We are never alone..." And you meekly raise your hand and squeak, "I am basically Kathy Acker if she had access to Wikipedia."
All of this to say: John von Neumann was built differently than you and I, and would've gotten through the material of this test with such alacrity (whilst saturation bombing every respective field in his cone of vision with paradigm shattering insights) that the canister of oleoresin capsicum would never have had time to overheat to the point of discharging in his asshole and fumigating his digestive tract with grizzly deterrent. Bhattacharya makes this clear by providing a whore's ervv (sic) (i.e. Hors d'oeuvre) of The Martian's contributions to human knowledge, the full course of which would carry on in this annoying fashion:
Mathematics (foundations of mathematics, measure theory, functional analysis, eating a box of index cards covered in arcane mathematical graffiti while standing in front of a mirror and proclaiming, "I am the Dragon. And you call me insane. You are privy to a great becoming, but you recognize nothing. To me, you are a slug in the sun. You are an ant in the afterbirth. It is your nature to do one thing correctly. Before me, you rightly tremble. But, fear is not what you owe me. YOU OWE ME AWE!" (seeks verification), backflipping and punching someone so hard in the solar plexus that they stagger into the punch bowl with a look of severe constipation and clamp the foldable party table around them like two pieces of stiff wonder bread (unsourced statement), ergodic theory, group theory, lattice theory, representation theory, operator algebras, dividing by zero (does not compute), geometry, and numerical analysis), physics (quantum mechanics, binding his feet with black electrical tape because he forgot his ninja tabi (whose passive mitigation stacks multiplicatively with armor and other damage reduction effects) and would not wish to alert his enemies with the albedo soles of his frozen asteroids (citation needed) hydrodynamics, nuclear physics and quantum statistical mechanics), economics (game theory and general equilibrium theory), computing (Von Neumann architecture, linear programming, numerical meteorology, creating sentient custards, scientific computing, self-replicating machines, stochastic computing), and statistics. He also published over 150 papers in his life: about 60 in pure mathematics, 60 in applied mathematics, 20 in physics, and the remainder on special mathematical subjects or non-mathematical ones, including this somewhat cryptic missive which reads:
"Asimov is a specialist beyotch. Act up." (false)
Am I suggesting that innate talent does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to reasoning quantitatively? Affirmative. Am I saying that you or I could never hope to be as smart as Neumann with equal resources - both attentional and material? Without question. If you find this observation disquieting, or it makes you want to cite the late Stephen J. Gould (who, bless his soul, could really turn a phrase, but managed to write a book which was so besieged by sentiment that it crowded all the space needed to transform it from an overtly political polemic into a scientifically respectable critique) I would avoid reading this book, because right here is a SON OF A BITCH that - sorry sorry. What I mean to say is; you can't read about differences in cognitive ability this stark without wanting to Isekai yourself with a tractor. Right here is a man that quite possibly exceeds the late Dick Feynman in his ability to make you feel as though dumbfuckery has infiltrated your lymphatic system, hopped every node critical to your cognitive self esteem and reduced you to a pile of groats and suet, which astute journalists construe as: "A new type of organism which resembles nothing so much as a moronic blood pudding of some kind."
If you're a swinging dick in a town of enfeebled flapdoodles, you are probably not acquainted with the ways in which a member can mutate into Fred Flintstone's cudgel, and so you may have trouble conceptualizing a creature that can make theoretical breakthroughs with a grace you can only harness when navigating towards titty-mags - but take it from me; it just ain't fair. That being said, I think you should occupy the position of a moronic slime at some point in your life. It's an interesting exercise in perspective taking. Not only will it help you remain grounded, it will also provide a window into the challenges that educators face in attempting to generalize their craft across the population. Addressing achievement gaps is quite difficult when it becomes impossible, (due to ideological moratorium), to acknowledge the individual differences in cognitive ability which are not the result of environmental/educational factors. So if you don't have the luxury of surrounding yourself with people who're freakishly well endowed, you can gawk at perhaps the biggest *redacted* in history by picking up this issue of Raise Your Dongers. This COMPLETE BASTARD who could divide two eight-digit numbers in his head at the tender age of six, while also requesting Kürtőskalács in Ancient Greek. Who, at this same age, caught his mother staring out a window and remarked: "I often dream of huge numb buildings. Jet-black sinister architecture being installed when nobody sees. Their appearance so sudden that few would take notice. And when I wake up, I imagine being crushed by one. Imagine its weight, its silence. The absence of excuses for a havoced life, and the privilege of a 22-kilometer tombstone. A body of black that carried no reflection. Defying its own room. Unearthly eggs of decreation." (citation needed) (i.e. "What are you calculating?"). Who, as an eight year old, was regularly exchanging sexual favors with differential and integral calculus, when he wasn't cheating on both with Wilhelm Oncken's 46-volume harem history series Allgemeine Geschichte in Einzeldarstellungen (gesundheit).
TL;DR: Good bio. Light on personal life. Heavier on intellectual history.
All of this to say: John von Neumann was built differently than you and I, and would've gotten through the material of this test with such alacrity (whilst saturation bombing every respective field in his cone of vision with paradigm shattering insights) that the canister of oleoresin capsicum would never have had time to overheat to the point of discharging in his asshole and fumigating his digestive tract with grizzly deterrent. Bhattacharya makes this clear by providing a whore's ervv (sic) (i.e. Hors d'oeuvre) of The Martian's contributions to human knowledge, the full course of which would carry on in this annoying fashion:
Mathematics (foundations of mathematics, measure theory, functional analysis, eating a box of index cards covered in arcane mathematical graffiti while standing in front of a mirror and proclaiming, "I am the Dragon. And you call me insane. You are privy to a great becoming, but you recognize nothing. To me, you are a slug in the sun. You are an ant in the afterbirth. It is your nature to do one thing correctly. Before me, you rightly tremble. But, fear is not what you owe me. YOU OWE ME AWE!" (seeks verification), backflipping and punching someone so hard in the solar plexus that they stagger into the punch bowl with a look of severe constipation and clamp the foldable party table around them like two pieces of stiff wonder bread (unsourced statement), ergodic theory, group theory, lattice theory, representation theory, operator algebras, dividing by zero (does not compute), geometry, and numerical analysis), physics (quantum mechanics, binding his feet with black electrical tape because he forgot his ninja tabi (whose passive mitigation stacks multiplicatively with armor and other damage reduction effects) and would not wish to alert his enemies with the albedo soles of his frozen asteroids (citation needed) hydrodynamics, nuclear physics and quantum statistical mechanics), economics (game theory and general equilibrium theory), computing (Von Neumann architecture, linear programming, numerical meteorology, creating sentient custards, scientific computing, self-replicating machines, stochastic computing), and statistics. He also published over 150 papers in his life: about 60 in pure mathematics, 60 in applied mathematics, 20 in physics, and the remainder on special mathematical subjects or non-mathematical ones, including this somewhat cryptic missive which reads:
"Asimov is a specialist beyotch. Act up." (false)
Am I suggesting that innate talent does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to reasoning quantitatively? Affirmative. Am I saying that you or I could never hope to be as smart as Neumann with equal resources - both attentional and material? Without question. If you find this observation disquieting, or it makes you want to cite the late Stephen J. Gould (who, bless his soul, could really turn a phrase, but managed to write a book which was so besieged by sentiment that it crowded all the space needed to transform it from an overtly political polemic into a scientifically respectable critique) I would avoid reading this book, because right here is a SON OF A BITCH that - sorry sorry. What I mean to say is; you can't read about differences in cognitive ability this stark without wanting to Isekai yourself with a tractor. Right here is a man that quite possibly exceeds the late Dick Feynman in his ability to make you feel as though dumbfuckery has infiltrated your lymphatic system, hopped every node critical to your cognitive self esteem and reduced you to a pile of groats and suet, which astute journalists construe as: "A new type of organism which resembles nothing so much as a moronic blood pudding of some kind."
If you're a swinging dick in a town of enfeebled flapdoodles, you are probably not acquainted with the ways in which a member can mutate into Fred Flintstone's cudgel, and so you may have trouble conceptualizing a creature that can make theoretical breakthroughs with a grace you can only harness when navigating towards titty-mags - but take it from me; it just ain't fair. That being said, I think you should occupy the position of a moronic slime at some point in your life. It's an interesting exercise in perspective taking. Not only will it help you remain grounded, it will also provide a window into the challenges that educators face in attempting to generalize their craft across the population. Addressing achievement gaps is quite difficult when it becomes impossible, (due to ideological moratorium), to acknowledge the individual differences in cognitive ability which are not the result of environmental/educational factors. So if you don't have the luxury of surrounding yourself with people who're freakishly well endowed, you can gawk at perhaps the biggest *redacted* in history by picking up this issue of Raise Your Dongers. This COMPLETE BASTARD who could divide two eight-digit numbers in his head at the tender age of six, while also requesting Kürtőskalács in Ancient Greek. Who, at this same age, caught his mother staring out a window and remarked: "I often dream of huge numb buildings. Jet-black sinister architecture being installed when nobody sees. Their appearance so sudden that few would take notice. And when I wake up, I imagine being crushed by one. Imagine its weight, its silence. The absence of excuses for a havoced life, and the privilege of a 22-kilometer tombstone. A body of black that carried no reflection. Defying its own room. Unearthly eggs of decreation." (citation needed) (i.e. "What are you calculating?"). Who, as an eight year old, was regularly exchanging sexual favors with differential and integral calculus, when he wasn't cheating on both with Wilhelm Oncken's 46-volume harem history series Allgemeine Geschichte in Einzeldarstellungen (gesundheit).
TL;DR: Good bio. Light on personal life. Heavier on intellectual history.
November 24, 2021
An awaited book; in fact I awaited it before I knew it was being written. Here is one of the most important people to ever live, and what notice do we take? Before now: One bad old biography (and one-third of another) and many gigantic maths monographs. Such yawning gaps come from historians and biographers being obsessed with artists instead - consider the nine Jane Austen biographies published in the last 11 years - and our scientists being inarticulate at best. unable or unwilling to stand up for themselves, and unrepresented by the chattering classes. (But a handful of scientists are great writers: Feynman and Dyson and Dawkins and Crick and Pascal and yeah Einstein is quotable and I was actually boggling at some of Gödel’s aphorisms just the other day. Boltzmann is funny.)
It is incredibly difficult to cover everything von Neumann did - everything he did for the first time in history - even just everything with vast practical consequences which are still felt 60 years later.
Chapter 2: fixing set theory where Hilbert and Russell failed
Chapter 3: unifying matrix and wave theory where Dirac bodged and others failed
Chapter 4: solution to a profound engineering challenge which changed the world forever
Great philosophers get several kinds of books written about them - two are the Life, and the intellectual biography, which actually tries to explain and show the development of their ideas. Bhattacharya’s is more like the latter plus a smattering of parties, fast cars, and intellectual bitching.
Hodges is, in 600pp, just able to enumerate Turing's achievements. Bhattacharya, in 284, is not even vaguely able to begin doing this for vN. Almost no mention of his great work in group theory.
—-
Very incomplete list of von Neumann’s achievements:
* Foundations of maths: Paradox-free foundation of set theory with classes (superceded Russell)
* Physics: Unification of matrix mechanics and wave mechanics (superceded Dirac)
* Physics:: proof of the Ergodic hypothesis
* Lots of group theory, chiefly operator algebras
* Foundations of QM: axiomatisation of QM, unified wave and matrix mechanics.
* Physics: Clarified the measurement problem (for the first time?)
* Physics:: Central work on the Copenhagen interpretation
* Physics / logic Founded quantum logic
* Economics: Proved existence and uniqueness of general equilibrium
* Physics: Much-misunderstood constraint on all hidden variable theories. Maybe gappy.
* linear programming: duality and the first interior point method.
* Fluid dynamics: Fat Man implosion lens design. Discovery of the airburst efficiency. Many solutions in blast waves.
* Hardware engineering: Redesigned the ENIAC to be the first stored program computer
* Computer engineering: Earliest partial design of a modern computer. Lifted lots from Mauchly and Eckert (uncredited) but greatly superceded them.
* Patent busting on the digital computer design. Free for all.
* Minimax and dozens of central results in game theory
* Founded utility theory
* Marrying neuroscience and computer science forever
* Founded automata theory
* Intelligence explosion as x-risk
* …
Bhattacharya mentions [EDIT: covers] about half of these.
—-
* The most important question in all of education: How did Hungary produce so many geniuses? Why did they stop? von Neumann’s own answer was the empire’s weird mix of 1) tolerance and rewards for Jewish people, while 2) still being extremely volatile and so making them uncertain how long this would last and so rushing to succeed.
* Bhattacharya’s informalisation of the technical results here is impressive. At least one fuckup though: on p112 he confuses completeness for correctness.
* At one point AB ties the Hilbert and Gödel work to modernism. Modernist mathematics, the rejection of the past, the flight into abstraction and rigour. As if this was a general spirit. I don’t know how to evaluate this idea.
* Sad to hear that a heavily modified ENIAC executed a stored program two months before the Manchester Baby. I hate to see the Man win over the garage nerds.
* Nash is nasty, well before he goes psychotic (self-aggrandising, straw Vulcan, racist). He makes von Neumann look soft and warm.
* Lovelace is not the first programmer. Klári von Neumann has a much better claim, if we insist on ignoring Babbage.
* So many brilliant people here, and far more obscure than JvN. Shapley, Barricelli, Collbohm, Goldstine, Harsanyi, McCarthy, Adele and Klári…
—-
We tend to deify people, and they never deserve it. What did von Neumann get wrong?
Mutually Assured Destruction
It's not obvious that this was a mistake - we're still here, MAD is a strong reason not to intentionally nuke people. But the sheer number of near misses and the overall estimate of 0.1% annual state risk, should make us think that the strategy was actually poor, that we are walking selection bias.
The less obvious response is that he knew all that and was trading some existential risk to block the Soviet Empire's anti-human practices from taking over. Since this argument also works for the Soviets, or for any value system which values itself, he seems to have settled for an appalling equilibrium. Tragedy of the value lock-in commons.
VN wanted cooperation, wanted a long life for humanity. But he couldn’t trust enough not to escalate. The true altruist cannot afford to cooperate simply.
First strike on the Soviets
The mistake was twofold: to assume that the Soviets would continue growing, and to assume that the nuclear taboo would not hold. That taboo, that tradition is one of the most precious things in the world, and almost nothing is worth breaking it. To which you reply: 100 million people are not worth it? To which I can only apologise and suggest that 100 million are not worth 300 million.
Trusting Klaus Fuchs
He actually handed the Soviets a new nuke design through the infamous Fuchs.
Nonerror: "Proof" of no hidden variables
The conventional view is that von Neumann screwed up his no-hidden-variables proof, claimed to have shown the impossibility of hidden variables, and that this convinced everyone until Bell came along and exposed the error (30 years after Grete Hermann did it and was ignored). But this misrepresents the proof, which just says that a hidden variables theory will have to have a certain weird structure (which Bohmian mechanics does).
Targeting Kyoto
I don't know if a nuclear strike on Japan was ultimately for the best (considering the appalling toll of the Pacific theatre on both sides, the likely larger toll of taking Honshū, and the second-order effects of showing the world that everything had changed). But that they were civilian strikes seems completely gratuitous. Striking Kyoto, the spiritual centre, in particular seems incredibly high risk.
Nonerror: The brain is digital
People act like he was naive about the brain as computer, but he just wasn’t:
The von Neumann bottleneck
The world standard architecture for computers leads to a huge waste of CPU cycles, waiting for memory. This wasn't such a big deal in the 50s, but CPU performance has masssively outpaced bus bandwidth over the last 70 years.
Against high-level programming
'von Neumann opposed the development of assemblers and high-level language compilers. He preferred to employ legions of human programmers (mostly low-paid graduate students) to hand-assemble code into machine language. “It is a waste of a valuable scientific computing instrument”, von Neumann reportedly said, “to use it to do clerical work.”.'
Various dumb personal risks
He did not live like someone who understood expected utility and hyperbolic discounting. He ate way too much, drove incredibly badly, was an easy mark for salesmen, pissed off his wife by leching. He spent a lot of time travelling to government meetings. He let others profit from his inventions. These imply irrationality - or a surprising lack of interest in his own wealth, longevity, time use, or marriage. This post collects other apparently bad decisions.
—-
It is incredibly difficult to cover everything von Neumann did - everything he did for the first time in history - even just everything with vast practical consequences which are still felt 60 years later.
Chapter 2: fixing set theory where Hilbert and Russell failed
Chapter 3: unifying matrix and wave theory where Dirac bodged and others failed
Chapter 4: solution to a profound engineering challenge which changed the world forever
Great philosophers get several kinds of books written about them - two are the Life, and the intellectual biography, which actually tries to explain and show the development of their ideas. Bhattacharya’s is more like the latter plus a smattering of parties, fast cars, and intellectual bitching.
Hodges is, in 600pp, just able to enumerate Turing's achievements. Bhattacharya, in 284, is not even vaguely able to begin doing this for vN. Almost no mention of his great work in group theory.
—-
Very incomplete list of von Neumann’s achievements:
* Foundations of maths: Paradox-free foundation of set theory with classes (superceded Russell)
* Physics: Unification of matrix mechanics and wave mechanics (superceded Dirac)
* Physics:: proof of the Ergodic hypothesis
* Lots of group theory, chiefly operator algebras
* Foundations of QM: axiomatisation of QM, unified wave and matrix mechanics.
* Physics: Clarified the measurement problem (for the first time?)
* Physics:: Central work on the Copenhagen interpretation
* Physics / logic Founded quantum logic
* Economics: Proved existence and uniqueness of general equilibrium
* Physics: Much-misunderstood constraint on all hidden variable theories. Maybe gappy.
* linear programming: duality and the first interior point method.
* Fluid dynamics: Fat Man implosion lens design. Discovery of the airburst efficiency. Many solutions in blast waves.
* Hardware engineering: Redesigned the ENIAC to be the first stored program computer
* Computer engineering: Earliest partial design of a modern computer. Lifted lots from Mauchly and Eckert (uncredited) but greatly superceded them.
* Patent busting on the digital computer design. Free for all.
* Minimax and dozens of central results in game theory
* Founded utility theory
* Marrying neuroscience and computer science forever
* Founded automata theory
* Intelligence explosion as x-risk
* …
Bhattacharya mentions [EDIT: covers] about half of these.
—-
* The most important question in all of education: How did Hungary produce so many geniuses? Why did they stop? von Neumann’s own answer was the empire’s weird mix of 1) tolerance and rewards for Jewish people, while 2) still being extremely volatile and so making them uncertain how long this would last and so rushing to succeed.
* Bhattacharya’s informalisation of the technical results here is impressive. At least one fuckup though: on p112 he confuses completeness for correctness.
* At one point AB ties the Hilbert and Gödel work to modernism. Modernist mathematics, the rejection of the past, the flight into abstraction and rigour. As if this was a general spirit. I don’t know how to evaluate this idea.
* Sad to hear that a heavily modified ENIAC executed a stored program two months before the Manchester Baby. I hate to see the Man win over the garage nerds.
* Nash is nasty, well before he goes psychotic (self-aggrandising, straw Vulcan, racist). He makes von Neumann look soft and warm.
* Lovelace is not the first programmer. Klári von Neumann has a much better claim, if we insist on ignoring Babbage.
* So many brilliant people here, and far more obscure than JvN. Shapley, Barricelli, Collbohm, Goldstine, Harsanyi, McCarthy, Adele and Klári…
—-
We tend to deify people, and they never deserve it. What did von Neumann get wrong?
Mutually Assured Destruction
It's not obvious that this was a mistake - we're still here, MAD is a strong reason not to intentionally nuke people. But the sheer number of near misses and the overall estimate of 0.1% annual state risk, should make us think that the strategy was actually poor, that we are walking selection bias.
The less obvious response is that he knew all that and was trading some existential risk to block the Soviet Empire's anti-human practices from taking over. Since this argument also works for the Soviets, or for any value system which values itself, he seems to have settled for an appalling equilibrium. Tragedy of the value lock-in commons.
VN wanted cooperation, wanted a long life for humanity. But he couldn’t trust enough not to escalate. The true altruist cannot afford to cooperate simply.
First strike on the Soviets
If you say 'why not bomb them tomorrow', I say, why not today? If you say 'today at five o'clock', I say why not one o'clock?(He recanted this a couple of years later.)
The mistake was twofold: to assume that the Soviets would continue growing, and to assume that the nuclear taboo would not hold. That taboo, that tradition is one of the most precious things in the world, and almost nothing is worth breaking it. To which you reply: 100 million people are not worth it? To which I can only apologise and suggest that 100 million are not worth 300 million.
Trusting Klaus Fuchs
He actually handed the Soviets a new nuke design through the infamous Fuchs.
Nonerror: "Proof" of no hidden variables
The conventional view is that von Neumann screwed up his no-hidden-variables proof, claimed to have shown the impossibility of hidden variables, and that this convinced everyone until Bell came along and exposed the error (30 years after Grete Hermann did it and was ignored). But this misrepresents the proof, which just says that a hidden variables theory will have to have a certain weird structure (which Bohmian mechanics does).
Targeting Kyoto
I don't know if a nuclear strike on Japan was ultimately for the best (considering the appalling toll of the Pacific theatre on both sides, the likely larger toll of taking Honshū, and the second-order effects of showing the world that everything had changed). But that they were civilian strikes seems completely gratuitous. Striking Kyoto, the spiritual centre, in particular seems incredibly high risk.
Nonerror: The brain is digital
People act like he was naive about the brain as computer, but he just wasn’t:
the brain can prima facie be considered as a digital computer. However, upon further reflection, some elements of analog computing (e.g., the chemistry) will also become relevant in understanding the functioning of the brain.
The von Neumann bottleneck
The world standard architecture for computers leads to a huge waste of CPU cycles, waiting for memory. This wasn't such a big deal in the 50s, but CPU performance has masssively outpaced bus bandwidth over the last 70 years.
Against high-level programming
'von Neumann opposed the development of assemblers and high-level language compilers. He preferred to employ legions of human programmers (mostly low-paid graduate students) to hand-assemble code into machine language. “It is a waste of a valuable scientific computing instrument”, von Neumann reportedly said, “to use it to do clerical work.”.'
Various dumb personal risks
He did not live like someone who understood expected utility and hyperbolic discounting. He ate way too much, drove incredibly badly, was an easy mark for salesmen, pissed off his wife by leching. He spent a lot of time travelling to government meetings. He let others profit from his inventions. These imply irrationality - or a surprising lack of interest in his own wealth, longevity, time use, or marriage. This post collects other apparently bad decisions.
—-
January 17, 2024
It is an intellectual biography spanning a relatively short but very eventful intellectual life of von Neumann. Very gifted, he has started his contribution to maths and physics in the age of 15 in the early 20s of the last century until his untimely death in 1957. The majority of his career was in Princeton Institute of Advance Studies. Based upon this book, I've made the conclusion that he was a bit like an intellectual magpie finding a cut-age areas of science that interested him and making his startling contribution. Later, the area would be taken over by someone else and would be properly developed. Was he a visionary? The book's answer is firm "yes". Both intellectually and organisationally, he has contributed into establishing such phenomena like a computer, an atomic bomb and a theory of games and many others. Still, reading has left me with a bit of reservation whether his personality and energy was not slightly over-emphasising the impact of his unique scientific contribution.
In any case, the science is a collective effort. And this book is really good in discussing scientific ideas and the context:
-the interpretations of quantum physics;
-Gilbert and his maths program;
- Manhattan project;
-Games theory;
-Computer and automata (machine replication).
We've meet the usual suspects such as Godel, Turing, Oppenheimer and all the usual quantum guys but including Dirac this time. It also mentioned the politicians and especially the US military big wigs of the period. But also I've learned of a few new personages. The most striking discoveries were:
- Grete Hermann - a woman mathematician and philosopher who found a gap with Neumann justification for Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. She was totally ignored in her time and the interpretation has become prevalent for about 50 years.
- George Price - an evolutionary biologist who discovered that an act of altruism could be rationally explained in evolution. But then he was still bothered that the altruism might be triggered by the biological selfishness. He dropped his job and started to make a lot of deliberate selfless acts. It did not help that he has become mentally ill. Nevertheless, sadly in his case it has all ended in a suicide. I am personally still sceptical that an altruism, a concept as we understand it, might be connected to evolution. And I know famous ants example.
The book has helped me to find out a lot about the intellectual atmosphere of that time. However, on the basis of this book, I do not think I can create an impression who was von Neumann as a person. But is it at all possible to recreate a human in a biography like that? Hard to say. He was controversial. He participated in the decisions like where exactly to drop an atomic bomb in Japan. And many others, that with hindsight, have put a humanity at a risk of distinction. But who was he? Even his wife of many years struggled with this question. Not long after his death, she remarried. But soon walked into the Pacific after filling "her elegant cocktail dress with 15 pounds of wet sand." In her unfinished memoirs, she wrote:
"I would like to tell about the man, the strange contradictory and controversial person; childish and good-humoured, sophisticated and savage, brilliantly clever yet with a very limited, almost primitive lack of ability to handle his emotions - an enigma of nature that will have to remain unresolved."
In any case, the science is a collective effort. And this book is really good in discussing scientific ideas and the context:
-the interpretations of quantum physics;
-Gilbert and his maths program;
- Manhattan project;
-Games theory;
-Computer and automata (machine replication).
We've meet the usual suspects such as Godel, Turing, Oppenheimer and all the usual quantum guys but including Dirac this time. It also mentioned the politicians and especially the US military big wigs of the period. But also I've learned of a few new personages. The most striking discoveries were:
- Grete Hermann - a woman mathematician and philosopher who found a gap with Neumann justification for Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. She was totally ignored in her time and the interpretation has become prevalent for about 50 years.
- George Price - an evolutionary biologist who discovered that an act of altruism could be rationally explained in evolution. But then he was still bothered that the altruism might be triggered by the biological selfishness. He dropped his job and started to make a lot of deliberate selfless acts. It did not help that he has become mentally ill. Nevertheless, sadly in his case it has all ended in a suicide. I am personally still sceptical that an altruism, a concept as we understand it, might be connected to evolution. And I know famous ants example.
The book has helped me to find out a lot about the intellectual atmosphere of that time. However, on the basis of this book, I do not think I can create an impression who was von Neumann as a person. But is it at all possible to recreate a human in a biography like that? Hard to say. He was controversial. He participated in the decisions like where exactly to drop an atomic bomb in Japan. And many others, that with hindsight, have put a humanity at a risk of distinction. But who was he? Even his wife of many years struggled with this question. Not long after his death, she remarried. But soon walked into the Pacific after filling "her elegant cocktail dress with 15 pounds of wet sand." In her unfinished memoirs, she wrote:
"I would like to tell about the man, the strange contradictory and controversial person; childish and good-humoured, sophisticated and savage, brilliantly clever yet with a very limited, almost primitive lack of ability to handle his emotions - an enigma of nature that will have to remain unresolved."
December 23, 2021
A solid book, but not the definitive biography of von Neumann that we've been longing for.
Bhattacharya approaches his subject by focusing on ideas. The first chapter takes care of JvN's early life, and the rest of the book is split up based on the subjects he worked on: mathematics, quantum mechanics, the nuclear bomb, computing, game theory, RAND, and artificial life. Large parts of the book (I'd say about a third) are dedicated not to von Neumann but rather the work other people did based on his ideas. The game theory chapter, for example, covers Nash, Schelling, Aumann, etc. in economics, and John Maynard Smith, Price, Hamilton, etc. in evolutionary game theory. Bhattacharya is good at making all these technical subjects accessible without dumbing them down too much.
The combination of the breadth of von Neumann's contributions and their originality is simply astounding, and this biography successfully conveys just how impressive and unique his achievements were.
JvN's personality, personal life, professional relationships, etc. on the other hand are given scant attention.
Overall it felt a bit too short. In less than 300 pages we get such a wide array of ideas, and the story of how they influenced so many people, that it often feels like we're just skimming the surface in a speedboat. I'd like to take a deeper, more ponderous ride in a submarine some day.
Bhattacharya approaches his subject by focusing on ideas. The first chapter takes care of JvN's early life, and the rest of the book is split up based on the subjects he worked on: mathematics, quantum mechanics, the nuclear bomb, computing, game theory, RAND, and artificial life. Large parts of the book (I'd say about a third) are dedicated not to von Neumann but rather the work other people did based on his ideas. The game theory chapter, for example, covers Nash, Schelling, Aumann, etc. in economics, and John Maynard Smith, Price, Hamilton, etc. in evolutionary game theory. Bhattacharya is good at making all these technical subjects accessible without dumbing them down too much.
The combination of the breadth of von Neumann's contributions and their originality is simply astounding, and this biography successfully conveys just how impressive and unique his achievements were.
JvN's personality, personal life, professional relationships, etc. on the other hand are given scant attention.
Overall it felt a bit too short. In less than 300 pages we get such a wide array of ideas, and the story of how they influenced so many people, that it often feels like we're just skimming the surface in a speedboat. I'd like to take a deeper, more ponderous ride in a submarine some day.
October 7, 2021
My review from the Literary Review, October 2021
The Man From the Future:
The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann
Ananyo Bhattacharya
Allen Lane
John Gribbin
John von Neumann is widely regarded by his scientific peers as the greatest genius born in the twentieth century. A combination of his intellect and his Hungarian origins (he started life, in 1903, as Neumann János Lajos) led colleagues to jokingly refer to him as a Martian, or a time traveller from the future. He made seminal contributions to mathematics, quantum theory, the development of nuclear weapons, the birth of the modern computer, game theory, and evolutionary biology, while living through the turbulent decades involving two hot wars and one cold war. Yet to the wide public he is not as well known as these achievements justify — certainly not as well known as Richard Feynman, although von Neumann was an equally colourful character. Ananyo Bhattacharya attempts to rectify this, and succeeds on one level while just missing the target on another.
The success is in the science. The author is a first-class science writer with an impeccable pedigree embracing stints at the Economist and Nature, and he does the best job I have seen of explaining the significance of von Neumann’s work across so many different fields. He is so enthusiastic about the science, however, that he often goes far beyond von Neumann’s direct contribution to bring the story of — say — game theory up to date, so that the reader almost forgets that this is supposed to be a book about von Neumann. So the near miss is the failure to bring his human subject to life. We get the facts, and some familiar anecdotes, but no real feel for the man himself. A more accurate subtitle would be “The Visionary Science of John Von Neumann”.
Here, one of those anecdotes will suffice to set von Neumann’s genius in context. When he left school in 1921, his father wanted to steer him to a career where he could make a living, but he wanted to study mathematics, perceived by his father as an impractical waste of time. So he did both, shuttling between the University of Berlin (and later the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich), where he studied for a degree in chemistry, and the University of Budapest, where he worked for a PhD in mathematics. He moved to the United States in 1930, and became known as John von Neumann at the age of 29. He was initially on a short-term appointment at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, but happy to make his move permanent when Hitler came to power in Germany,
If you are interested in the development in the twentieth century of science that impacts all our lives today, there is no better place to seek for information. This is also a good place to get the details on von Neumann’s most famous mistake. In 1932, the great man wrote a book summarising the state of knowledge about quantum mechanics, and among other things ruling out a whole class of explanations of quantum phenomena. This ruling out was based on what by his standards was a trivial error, which was spotted by one junior German mathematical philosopher, Grete Hermann. But the physics world was so in awe of von Neumann that for three decades everybody else accepted his word, without checking the arithmetic. It was only when John Bell drew attention to the mistake that quantum physics took off in a new direction, leading directly to modern quantum computers.
But long before then, von Neumann himself had moved on. His own interest in computers came through the need for such machines in calculating the design of nuclear weapons, and Bhattacharya does an excellent job of tracing this development, in which von Neumann led the way to the construction of the first American programmable computer. In one of my few quibbles with the book, however, I can find no mention of the earlier British machine COLOSSUS, built at Bletchley Park for the codebreakers. Alan Turing, though, does feature in his rightful place in the story.
Turing and von Neumann shared another common interest, literally the meaning of life. Turing’s tragic death cut short his contribution to this field, but von Neumann introduced the idea of “self-reproducing automata”, which are now very near to becoming reality in the form of 3D printers that can print the parts to make other 3D printers. This is tantalisingly close to one of my favourite science-fiction tropes, spacefaring probes that can travel to the planets of other stars where they build replicas of themselves to continue the exploration of the Galaxy. Such spaceprobes are now known as “von Neumann machines”; starting with just one such machine, limited to travelling at much less than the speed of light, it would be possible to explore every planetary system in our Galaxy in a few million years. Which raises the “Fermi paradox” — why haven’t we been visited? One bleak possible answer is highlighted in Philip K. Dick’s story, referenced by Bhattacharya, about automatic factories consuming the Earth’s resources to make things nobody needs, including more automatic factories.
Von Neumann died in February 1957, failing by a few months to live to see the launch of what may one day be remembered as the ancestor of those Galaxy-exploring self-reproducing automata — if Dick’s “autofacs” don’t consume everything first. This book is a fine tribute to his genius and his contributions to science, but it contains far more science than life. If that floats your boat, I strongly recommend it.
John Gribbin is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sussex and author of Computing With Quantum Cats (Black Swan)
The Man From the Future:
The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann
Ananyo Bhattacharya
Allen Lane
John Gribbin
John von Neumann is widely regarded by his scientific peers as the greatest genius born in the twentieth century. A combination of his intellect and his Hungarian origins (he started life, in 1903, as Neumann János Lajos) led colleagues to jokingly refer to him as a Martian, or a time traveller from the future. He made seminal contributions to mathematics, quantum theory, the development of nuclear weapons, the birth of the modern computer, game theory, and evolutionary biology, while living through the turbulent decades involving two hot wars and one cold war. Yet to the wide public he is not as well known as these achievements justify — certainly not as well known as Richard Feynman, although von Neumann was an equally colourful character. Ananyo Bhattacharya attempts to rectify this, and succeeds on one level while just missing the target on another.
The success is in the science. The author is a first-class science writer with an impeccable pedigree embracing stints at the Economist and Nature, and he does the best job I have seen of explaining the significance of von Neumann’s work across so many different fields. He is so enthusiastic about the science, however, that he often goes far beyond von Neumann’s direct contribution to bring the story of — say — game theory up to date, so that the reader almost forgets that this is supposed to be a book about von Neumann. So the near miss is the failure to bring his human subject to life. We get the facts, and some familiar anecdotes, but no real feel for the man himself. A more accurate subtitle would be “The Visionary Science of John Von Neumann”.
Here, one of those anecdotes will suffice to set von Neumann’s genius in context. When he left school in 1921, his father wanted to steer him to a career where he could make a living, but he wanted to study mathematics, perceived by his father as an impractical waste of time. So he did both, shuttling between the University of Berlin (and later the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich), where he studied for a degree in chemistry, and the University of Budapest, where he worked for a PhD in mathematics. He moved to the United States in 1930, and became known as John von Neumann at the age of 29. He was initially on a short-term appointment at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, but happy to make his move permanent when Hitler came to power in Germany,
If you are interested in the development in the twentieth century of science that impacts all our lives today, there is no better place to seek for information. This is also a good place to get the details on von Neumann’s most famous mistake. In 1932, the great man wrote a book summarising the state of knowledge about quantum mechanics, and among other things ruling out a whole class of explanations of quantum phenomena. This ruling out was based on what by his standards was a trivial error, which was spotted by one junior German mathematical philosopher, Grete Hermann. But the physics world was so in awe of von Neumann that for three decades everybody else accepted his word, without checking the arithmetic. It was only when John Bell drew attention to the mistake that quantum physics took off in a new direction, leading directly to modern quantum computers.
But long before then, von Neumann himself had moved on. His own interest in computers came through the need for such machines in calculating the design of nuclear weapons, and Bhattacharya does an excellent job of tracing this development, in which von Neumann led the way to the construction of the first American programmable computer. In one of my few quibbles with the book, however, I can find no mention of the earlier British machine COLOSSUS, built at Bletchley Park for the codebreakers. Alan Turing, though, does feature in his rightful place in the story.
Turing and von Neumann shared another common interest, literally the meaning of life. Turing’s tragic death cut short his contribution to this field, but von Neumann introduced the idea of “self-reproducing automata”, which are now very near to becoming reality in the form of 3D printers that can print the parts to make other 3D printers. This is tantalisingly close to one of my favourite science-fiction tropes, spacefaring probes that can travel to the planets of other stars where they build replicas of themselves to continue the exploration of the Galaxy. Such spaceprobes are now known as “von Neumann machines”; starting with just one such machine, limited to travelling at much less than the speed of light, it would be possible to explore every planetary system in our Galaxy in a few million years. Which raises the “Fermi paradox” — why haven’t we been visited? One bleak possible answer is highlighted in Philip K. Dick’s story, referenced by Bhattacharya, about automatic factories consuming the Earth’s resources to make things nobody needs, including more automatic factories.
Von Neumann died in February 1957, failing by a few months to live to see the launch of what may one day be remembered as the ancestor of those Galaxy-exploring self-reproducing automata — if Dick’s “autofacs” don’t consume everything first. This book is a fine tribute to his genius and his contributions to science, but it contains far more science than life. If that floats your boat, I strongly recommend it.
John Gribbin is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sussex and author of Computing With Quantum Cats (Black Swan)
December 28, 2021
Tore through this. Perfect balance between details on JvN's life and thinking, and little tangents and anecdotes from e.g. the construction of the bomb and early computer history. Dense and not too long. Up there with The Dream Machine for enjoyment and insight. Imagine if JvN and Frank Ramsey had both lived 10 years longer — the ideas we missed out on...
I especially liked the epigraph quoting Edward Teller —
"Von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us."
I especially liked the epigraph quoting Edward Teller —
"Von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us."
July 17, 2022
Ao chegar ao fim de "The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann" (2021), e tendo em conta a enorme particularidade do intelecto de Von Neumann — aos 6 conseguia fazer divisões com 8 dígitos de cabeça e conversar em grego antigo e latim, aos 8 trabalhava com cálculo diferencial e integral e falava Francês, Inglês e Alemão além do Húngaro, no entretanto leu uma história mundial em 45 volumes e conseguia recitar capítulos inteiros décadas mais tarde —, não consigo deixar de pensar que por mais que endeusemos alguns humanos em particular pelos seus aparentes enormes feitos, o certo de tudo é que estes nada fizeram sozinhos. Ananyo Bhattacharya esquiva-se a falar da pessoa de Von Neumann, centrando-se exclusivamente sobre os seus contributos teóricos. Para esse efeito, trabalha os contributos de Von Neumann para as múltiplas ciências — mecânica quântica, teoria dos jogos, implosão nuclear, arquitetura de computadores e a teoria dos autómatos—, e como esses conduziram no futuro outros a saltos aplicados na história da ciência e tecnologia do século XX. Deste modo Bhattacharya espera demonstrar que Von Neumann previa ou viajava no futuro, contudo, Bhattacharya esquece-se de fazer o mesmo trabalho olhando para o passado, e mais em particular para o lado. Sendo o trabalho de Von Neumann de grande valor, ele não teria existido sem todas as restantes mentes brilhantes com quem se cruzou, de Claude Shannon a Alan Turing, de Einstein a Kurt Gödel, de Erwin Schrödinger a Werner Heisenberg. Este endeusamento pela abstração de ideias pode ser interessante para os colegas das ciências duras, mas eu senti imensa falta do factor humano. Gostaria de ter aprendido mais sobre a pessoa por detrás do modelo usado por Stanley Kubrick para criar Dr. Strangelove, não só pelas profundas contradições morais da sua pessoa, mas também para compreender melhor a base dos seus processos criativos.
Publicado no VI:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...
Publicado no VI:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...
September 18, 2023
‘A cat, most people would agree, can be either dead or alive. But if we follow von Neumann’s logic, until someone opens the chamber, the cat’s wave function is entangled (the term is used for the first time in this paper) with that of the radioactive substance, and the unfortunate feline is both alive and dead. If quantum mechanics can result in such patently obvious nonsense at the macroscopic scale, how can we know the theory ‘truly’ describes the atomic realm? Schrödinger was intimating that quantum theory was not the end of the road.’
Devoured this stupidly fast; now I simply need to go read The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut once more. Shall add a bit more thoughts to this later (though it feels so unnecessary, so perhaps some excerpts).
November 15, 2021
Fascinujúce. Asi šestina knihy je matematika, ktorej som nerozumel, potom je tam dosť kvantovej fyziky, ktorej som nerozumel, a potom ešte matematické časti o teórii hier a teória systémov, čomu som veľmi nerozumel, ale napriek tomu a čiastočne práve preto to bola neuveriteľná jazda. Prvýkrát som napríklad pochopil, že Schrödinger na príklade mačky v krabici vysvetľoval, aké hlúpe sú teórie ostatných, nie že by to on tvrdil, že mačka je aj mŕtva aj živá. Dozvedel som sa, že prvé pamäťové médiá prvých počítačov boli trubice s tekutinou, kde sa na vstupe premenil elektrický signál na zvukový, ten pooooomaaaaaliiiičkyyyy prechádzal trubicou, na konci sa premenil zasa na elektrický signál, ten sa zaviedol zasa na začiatku trubice - a máte pamätové médium! A veľa ďalších vecí.
A okrem toho je to teda pozoruhodný príbeh pozoruhodného chlapíka.
A okrem toho je to teda pozoruhodný príbeh pozoruhodného chlapíka.
Read
February 8, 2022What an excellent biography of a remarkable and visionary man! John von Neumann could be considered "first among equals" during his lifetime, and as far as I remember from a documentary some years ago, the famous mathematician Paul R. Halmos, having worked as an assistant to von Neumann had said something along the lines of "von Neumann jumped from one topic to another, if he fully concentrated on pure math, we probably would regard him as the next Euler." Indeed, sometimes I wonder what would happen if von Neumann lived as long as Euler, without being bothered with wars and threats of an unprecedented scale.
I enjoyed this biography very much not only because the author managed to portray the complex character of von Neumann, as a world-renowned genius and the bearer of a great intellectual tradition, but he also provided the reader with abalanced and not watered-down descriptions of the great man's work together with all of the interesting collaborations he managed to pull. I don't consider this an easy task, given the breadth of von Neumann's seminal contributions to so many fields in science, mathematics, economy, and of course, computing machinery as we know it.
I also learned interesting bits of computing history, for example I didn't know that his wife, Klára Dán von Neuman, was among the first computer programmers in the second half of 1940s.
If you are into the history of mathematics, physics, game theory, economics, computers and artificial intelligence, I suggest that you prepare your favorite drink, grab this book, fasten your seat-belts, and enjoy the ride, reading about the accomplishments of probably the brightest minds to have ever visited us on Earth in the previous century.
I enjoyed this biography very much not only because the author managed to portray the complex character of von Neumann, as a world-renowned genius and the bearer of a great intellectual tradition, but he also provided the reader with abalanced and not watered-down descriptions of the great man's work together with all of the interesting collaborations he managed to pull. I don't consider this an easy task, given the breadth of von Neumann's seminal contributions to so many fields in science, mathematics, economy, and of course, computing machinery as we know it.
I also learned interesting bits of computing history, for example I didn't know that his wife, Klára Dán von Neuman, was among the first computer programmers in the second half of 1940s.
If you are into the history of mathematics, physics, game theory, economics, computers and artificial intelligence, I suggest that you prepare your favorite drink, grab this book, fasten your seat-belts, and enjoy the ride, reading about the accomplishments of probably the brightest minds to have ever visited us on Earth in the previous century.
March 16, 2022
I want to give this book 4 stars despite the fact that I found it a bit difficult to follow the ideas discussed in this biography. As many other reviews have mentioned, this book is unlike any traditional biography. The approach of the author is more like describing von Neumann’s ideas, and then quickly followed by more recent findings or further developments to the ideas by other scientists or scholars from other fields who found the use of von Neumann’s ideas in their respective fields. Now, who is really John von Neumann? Other scientists of his age often jokingly called him The Man from the Future as the title of the book suggests. His fingerprints are everywhere, even on the device I’m using now to type this review. But I only came to know his name while reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Einstein.
John von Neumann was born Neumann János Lanos in 1903 in Budapest to an ennobled Jewish family, for their service to the Austro-Hungarian Empire (the ennoblement happened in 1913). He came to use various aliases throughout his life, such as Johann Neumann von Margitta during his time studying in Germany and later settled with John von Neumann or Johnny when he became an American citizen in the 1930s. As I’ve said above, only a few parts of the book actually contain references to von Neumann’s actual life, with a large part of the book dedicated to von Neumann’s ideas. But it’s not without any reason. For von Neumann, ideas might as well be something that describes his life. Ever since his childhood, thinking had become something he enjoyed doing on a daily basis, and he got paid for it (one of von Neumann’s primary motivations in life was reportedly money).
He got famous first and foremost because of his contribution to the field of mathematics, but what makes von Neumann different from other scientists of his time was his way to find wide applications of his theories even in other fields that might not seem to be related at all to mathematics. The nuclear bombs that were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 were reportedly dropped on a certain height above the ground following the calculations from von Neumann, in order to maximise the impact on the towns below. His other contribution in game theory, now a discipline of economics, first came into being in 1928 with his publication of minimax theorem that establishes that in zero-sum games with perfect information, there exists a pair of strategies for both players to minimise their maximum losses. Some of his theories would find critics at a later time, but mostly the critics were there in order to complete his theories rather than repudiating them. For example, mathematician John Nash, who would be awarded Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994 and whose life is chronicled by Sylvia Nasar in A Beautiful Mind, developed von Neumann’s foundation on game theory into the Nash equilibrium to define a solution for non-cooperative games with two or more players with often incompatible goals, that finds use in decision makings for large corporations and the military.
As the subtitle suggests, John von Neumann was indeed visionary for his time. The last theory he worked on in the last years of his life in the 1950s was about the theory of automata, which largely explains about a machine or a structure that could replicate itself, something that in time would find its larger use, particularly in the development of artificial intelligence, although the term would only be coined by John McCarthy several years later. Von Neumann’s automata theory also found its use in the field of biology, notably inspiring some biologists working in the replication of DNA. The computers and gadgets that we use to contain more or less the systems first developed by von Neumann, with regards to the development of algorithms used in the first computer, and also the automata theory that followed. “If people do not believe that mathematics is simple,” von Neumann once said, “it is only because they do not realise how complicated life is.”
John von Neumann was born Neumann János Lanos in 1903 in Budapest to an ennobled Jewish family, for their service to the Austro-Hungarian Empire (the ennoblement happened in 1913). He came to use various aliases throughout his life, such as Johann Neumann von Margitta during his time studying in Germany and later settled with John von Neumann or Johnny when he became an American citizen in the 1930s. As I’ve said above, only a few parts of the book actually contain references to von Neumann’s actual life, with a large part of the book dedicated to von Neumann’s ideas. But it’s not without any reason. For von Neumann, ideas might as well be something that describes his life. Ever since his childhood, thinking had become something he enjoyed doing on a daily basis, and he got paid for it (one of von Neumann’s primary motivations in life was reportedly money).
He got famous first and foremost because of his contribution to the field of mathematics, but what makes von Neumann different from other scientists of his time was his way to find wide applications of his theories even in other fields that might not seem to be related at all to mathematics. The nuclear bombs that were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 were reportedly dropped on a certain height above the ground following the calculations from von Neumann, in order to maximise the impact on the towns below. His other contribution in game theory, now a discipline of economics, first came into being in 1928 with his publication of minimax theorem that establishes that in zero-sum games with perfect information, there exists a pair of strategies for both players to minimise their maximum losses. Some of his theories would find critics at a later time, but mostly the critics were there in order to complete his theories rather than repudiating them. For example, mathematician John Nash, who would be awarded Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994 and whose life is chronicled by Sylvia Nasar in A Beautiful Mind, developed von Neumann’s foundation on game theory into the Nash equilibrium to define a solution for non-cooperative games with two or more players with often incompatible goals, that finds use in decision makings for large corporations and the military.
As the subtitle suggests, John von Neumann was indeed visionary for his time. The last theory he worked on in the last years of his life in the 1950s was about the theory of automata, which largely explains about a machine or a structure that could replicate itself, something that in time would find its larger use, particularly in the development of artificial intelligence, although the term would only be coined by John McCarthy several years later. Von Neumann’s automata theory also found its use in the field of biology, notably inspiring some biologists working in the replication of DNA. The computers and gadgets that we use to contain more or less the systems first developed by von Neumann, with regards to the development of algorithms used in the first computer, and also the automata theory that followed. “If people do not believe that mathematics is simple,” von Neumann once said, “it is only because they do not realise how complicated life is.”
October 19, 2022
I may not be qualified to use this phrase but this is a TOUR DE FORCE about the life of John von Neumann and the fields he touched. Bhattacharya often strays from strict biography to talk about important moments in science, including set theory, quantum mechanics, game theory, and cellular automata. It's not too dense, even though it could be, and I found the cellular automata section to be the most interesting.
- On Russell's paradox, which comes up in the set theory section: “Einstein... dismissed the feud as a completely overblown Froschmäusekrieg (literally a war of frogs and mice, a German phrase describing a bitter but unimportant altercation)”
- The Monte Carlo method (uses simulations to estimate the probability of an event) is named after the place von Neumann met Klari, his wife.
- On the use of simulation to study segregation: Schelling was the first to study segregation using simulation and found that "even a mild proclivity for like-coloured neighbors resulted in segregation" -- any preference > 33% for like-coloured neighbors causes an eventual partition. Obv under certain constraints but it's a cool result
- A compliment I will save for later: Jeremy Bernstein described von Neumann's talks as "the best lectures I have ever heard on anything -- like mental champagne."
- von Neumann on long-termism: "There is, as he puts it, no 'complete recipe' -- no panacea -- f or avoiding extinction at the hands of technology. 'We can specify only the human qualities required: patience, flexibility, intelligence.'"
- On Russell's paradox, which comes up in the set theory section: “Einstein... dismissed the feud as a completely overblown Froschmäusekrieg (literally a war of frogs and mice, a German phrase describing a bitter but unimportant altercation)”
- The Monte Carlo method (uses simulations to estimate the probability of an event) is named after the place von Neumann met Klari, his wife.
- On the use of simulation to study segregation: Schelling was the first to study segregation using simulation and found that "even a mild proclivity for like-coloured neighbors resulted in segregation" -- any preference > 33% for like-coloured neighbors causes an eventual partition. Obv under certain constraints but it's a cool result
- A compliment I will save for later: Jeremy Bernstein described von Neumann's talks as "the best lectures I have ever heard on anything -- like mental champagne."
- von Neumann on long-termism: "There is, as he puts it, no 'complete recipe' -- no panacea -- f or avoiding extinction at the hands of technology. 'We can specify only the human qualities required: patience, flexibility, intelligence.'"
October 5, 2023
"Terrified by the prospect of his own imminent death, von Neumann asked to see the hospital’s Catholic priest and returned to the faith he had ignored ever since his family had converted to it decades earlier in Budapest. ‘There probably is a God,’ he had once told his mother. ‘Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn’t.’"
"Marina says her father was thinking of Pascal’s wager and had always believed that in the face of even a small possibility of suffering eternal damnation the only logical course is to be a believer before the end: ‘My father told me, in so many words, once, that Catholicism was a very rough religion to live in but it was the only one to die in.’"
"Marina says her father was thinking of Pascal’s wager and had always believed that in the face of even a small possibility of suffering eternal damnation the only logical course is to be a believer before the end: ‘My father told me, in so many words, once, that Catholicism was a very rough religion to live in but it was the only one to die in.’"
November 23, 2022
i was hoping this, the fourth biography of von Neumann i've read, would be the one to paint a complete picture of The Man...alas, it was not. pretty threadbare, very weak on his scientific accomplishments, not much that hasn't been written elsewhere. better than the other three, but it does not yet bring us closer to understanding the Old One. the true biography still waits to be written.
August 5, 2022
Ако трябва да назовете кой е геният на двадесети век, едва ли ще се сетите за Джон фон Нойман. Но може би трябва. Неслучайно той е наречен "човекът от бъдещето" заради визионерските идеи, далеч изпреварили времето си. Унгарец по произход, фон Нойман е принуден да емигрира в САЩ поради широко разпространения антисемитизъм в Европа. Фон Нойман взема активно участие в разработването на атомната бомба - проект Манхатън. След края на войната става пионер в компютърните науки, теория на игрите и въвежда идеята за самореплициращи се машини (автоматони). Фон Нойман първи използва термина "сингулярност" в неговия технологичен смисъл. Изказва опасения за натрупването на въглероден диоксид в атмосферата (парников ефект) много преди това да стане актуална тема.
Книгата "Човекът от бъдещето" е изключително сложна за четене и изисква сериозни познания по математиката, информатика и природни науки. Засягат се идеи като Entscheidungsproblem на Гьодел, p срещу np проблем и има подробно описание на играта "Живот" на Джон Конуей, от която мозъкът ви може да експлодира. Наистина, проверете в Wikipedia Conway's Game of Life.
Мога да препоръчам книгата само на хора, които не се страхуват да се почувстват глупави. Това със сигурност ще стане след прочитането.
Книгата "Човекът от бъдещето" е изключително сложна за четене и изисква сериозни познания по математиката, информатика и природни науки. Засягат се идеи като Entscheidungsproblem на Гьодел, p срещу np проблем и има подробно описание на играта "Живот" на Джон Конуей, от която мозъкът ви може да експлодира. Наистина, проверете в Wikipedia Conway's Game of Life.
Мога да препоръчам книгата само на хора, които не се страхуват да се почувстват глупави. Това със сигурност ще стане след прочитането.
January 21, 2022
This book is only nominally about John von Neumann. It was disappointing and painful to read.
March 25, 2022
Non è una biografia di Von Neumann
Se state cercando una biografia di John von Neumann, non siete cascati sul libro giusto. Sì, qualcosa che riguarda la sua vita la si trova, ma non è certo questo il punto di vista che Bhattacharya intende portare avanti nel suo libro. Gli ampi capitoli, sui temi di ricerca che von Neumann ha lavorato nella sua relativamente breve vita - logica matematica, fisica quantistica, le bombe A e H, la creazione dei computer, la teoria dei giochi, gli automi cellulari - tendono a mostrare il suo lavoro seminale soprattutto vedendo come è stato portato avanti; lo si vede soprattutto quando si parla di automi cellulari, dove il contributo di von Neumann - checché ne dica Bhattacharya che è chiaramente un suo fan sfegatato - non è poi così importante. In definitiva, il libro è interessante, soprattutto per chi vuole farsi un'idea di tutti questi temi: basta sapere cosa aspettarsi!
Se state cercando una biografia di John von Neumann, non siete cascati sul libro giusto. Sì, qualcosa che riguarda la sua vita la si trova, ma non è certo questo il punto di vista che Bhattacharya intende portare avanti nel suo libro. Gli ampi capitoli, sui temi di ricerca che von Neumann ha lavorato nella sua relativamente breve vita - logica matematica, fisica quantistica, le bombe A e H, la creazione dei computer, la teoria dei giochi, gli automi cellulari - tendono a mostrare il suo lavoro seminale soprattutto vedendo come è stato portato avanti; lo si vede soprattutto quando si parla di automi cellulari, dove il contributo di von Neumann - checché ne dica Bhattacharya che è chiaramente un suo fan sfegatato - non è poi così importante. In definitiva, il libro è interessante, soprattutto per chi vuole farsi un'idea di tutti questi temi: basta sapere cosa aspettarsi!
September 13, 2022
It is perhaps an understatement to say that John von Neumann made "major contributions" to mathematics, physics, game theory, operational research and computer science; he made fundamental foundational advances, started whole new fields of research and was pivotal in major new technological advances. To understand enough of what von Neumann did in order to be able to coherently explain it to a lay audience would be no mean task, but Ananyo Bhattacharya has done an excellent job of doing just that.
Labelled as "Biography/Science" by the publisher on the back cover, it is indeed not just a biography (though it is that) but popular exposition of many of von Neumann's science contributions. It appears exquisitely researched and I found it a pleasure to read - which I did in one sitting (albeit I was constrained to be sitting on a plane for many hours).
The author doesn't shy away from really describing the technical details of the science, from the way "lenses" can focus pressure waves in nuclear bombs, to the details of how cellular automata algorithms work. I found it well-explained, though I am a practicing physicist which may give me an advantage, but also would make me critical of wrong explanations. I enjoyed the more biographical parts, and wouldn't have minded a more complete biography if the source material is out there.
Where I did occasionally get thrown were when the narrative jumped around a little in time, or with phrases like
Did Pinochet flock to Mises's private seminars, or was he influenced by Hayek? There's a bit of this, but it's a minor niggle that doesn't detract from the overall enjoyment. Oh, and the one sentence that I definitely would have rewritten is the first of chapter 8:
Presumably the use of simile is to compare something we are unfamiliar with with something we are. That's quite an assumption about the readership, not only that we are watchers of porn videos, but sufficiently expert to distinguish professional ones from amateur.
Labelled as "Biography/Science" by the publisher on the back cover, it is indeed not just a biography (though it is that) but popular exposition of many of von Neumann's science contributions. It appears exquisitely researched and I found it a pleasure to read - which I did in one sitting (albeit I was constrained to be sitting on a plane for many hours).
The author doesn't shy away from really describing the technical details of the science, from the way "lenses" can focus pressure waves in nuclear bombs, to the details of how cellular automata algorithms work. I found it well-explained, though I am a practicing physicist which may give me an advantage, but also would make me critical of wrong explanations. I enjoyed the more biographical parts, and wouldn't have minded a more complete biography if the source material is out there.
Where I did occasionally get thrown were when the narrative jumped around a little in time, or with phrases like
Among those who flocked to the private seminars Mises held in his office was future Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek, whose criticisms of central planning and socialism would inspire economic liberalizers like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan – and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Did Pinochet flock to Mises's private seminars, or was he influenced by Hayek? There's a bit of this, but it's a minor niggle that doesn't detract from the overall enjoyment. Oh, and the one sentence that I definitely would have rewritten is the first of chapter 8:
The odd angles, harsh lighting and wobbly movements of the hand-cam give the video of a 3D printer at work the air of an amateur porn film.
Presumably the use of simile is to compare something we are unfamiliar with with something we are. That's quite an assumption about the readership, not only that we are watchers of porn videos, but sufficiently expert to distinguish professional ones from amateur.
September 4, 2022
The blurb of this book describes John von Neumann as a "remarkable, yet largely overlooked, scientist". I therefore find it supremely ironic that the "biography" that is supposed to remedy the overlooked status of von Neumann somehow manages to crowd him out with history lessons, details of other people's accomplishments, and schematics for how to build nuclear weapons. We don't get much insight into his inner world, his more humann side. Perhaps this was intentional, since JvN's supercomputing nogginn made him appear to others as an alienn.
Complaints aside, I did enjoy learning about all the ways that JvN's ideas influenced the world we live in today. The historical context was interesting and JvN's brilliance was definitely conveyed. It's pretty humbling to realize that one's full brainn probably has the same mental capacity and processing power as half of von Neumann's least useful neuronn. C'est la vie.
Complaints aside, I did enjoy learning about all the ways that JvN's ideas influenced the world we live in today. The historical context was interesting and JvN's brilliance was definitely conveyed. It's pretty humbling to realize that one's full brainn probably has the same mental capacity and processing power as half of von Neumann's least useful neuronn. C'est la vie.
March 21, 2024
I am sure that at the end of this year 2024 this book is going to stay within my year's best three readings. A revolutionary mind who contributed to move so many different fields ahead such as economics, biotech, computing, neuroscience or military strategy. Ideal reading for dilettantes. Fascinating time spent reading it. Utterly recommended.
February 17, 2023
Highlights: A gem of a biography. Provides a 360 degree view of Neumann and his amazingly productive life. Well researched, well written. If you want to see what a true genius in action looks like (hint: it's NOT what passes for genius today, e.g. Steve Jobs or Elon Musk), read this book.
Challenges: Several times, the author appears to go off on a tangent and you're left wondering what the relevance is to Neumann. He does eventually connect the dots, but not before you've made a dent in your scalp thru significant head scratching.
Challenges: Several times, the author appears to go off on a tangent and you're left wondering what the relevance is to Neumann. He does eventually connect the dots, but not before you've made a dent in your scalp thru significant head scratching.
February 13, 2023
I didn't expect to learn as much as I did from this book. I was fascinated by the chapter on automatons, surprised on the chapter with game theory, and charmed by the anecdotes that I haven't read so far in other books. (about Los Alamos, for example.)
I think 30% of the book was based around Von Neumann's actual life and work. The rest was either general exposition, or a mini-biography of another prominent scientist in the same field. These were intriguing, but you should know that this book isn't totally focused on Von Neumann before you read it with those expectations.
Overall, very glad to have read it. Thank you for the nice surprise Bhattacharya.
I think 30% of the book was based around Von Neumann's actual life and work. The rest was either general exposition, or a mini-biography of another prominent scientist in the same field. These were intriguing, but you should know that this book isn't totally focused on Von Neumann before you read it with those expectations.
Overall, very glad to have read it. Thank you for the nice surprise Bhattacharya.
April 13, 2023
What an absolute delight reading the magnificent life of Von Neumann. This man practically had influence over all the important technologies used by mankind today, truly a man from the future!
April 11, 2022
Strange book to review. It certainly doesn't follow the expected beats of a biography. Rather than follow von Neumann on a personal and professional level throughout his life from beginning to end, the structure is something like this: von Neumann shapes (or helps shape) some mathematical concept which typically has a practical application. The book will talk about said concept and then branch out to other mathematicians and talk about how they took the concept further or applied it.
This is unusual given that there are large sections of the book where von Neumann is barely mentioned if at all. The book chooses to dispense with most of the subject's personal life in favor of focusing heavily on his ground-breaking work in math and science. I don't think this is a bad idea on its face, but personally I always felt off-balance while reading. I was never sure how long the book would stick to a subject or group of people.
Also I would assume that a lot of the math presented in this book is going to be over most people's heads. It was for me at least, which isn't saying much but again I would wager this will be the case for most people that aren't in the field. I would criticize the author for not boiling down the math to something simpler, but who am I to say that's even possible? Maybe Bhattacharya was doing his best already to simplify everything, which would speak to how brilliant von Neumann and his colleagues were.
I could never settle in with this book because it didn't contain much of a through-line. If you're interested in von Neumann this book does an incredibly thorough job exploring his professional achievements......whether you'll understand them or not........and it spends time talking about a lot of other people too. Like I said, a strange book to review.
PS: I did appreciate learning how much mathematics and philosophy arrive at and tackle the same problems. Very illuminating.
This is unusual given that there are large sections of the book where von Neumann is barely mentioned if at all. The book chooses to dispense with most of the subject's personal life in favor of focusing heavily on his ground-breaking work in math and science. I don't think this is a bad idea on its face, but personally I always felt off-balance while reading. I was never sure how long the book would stick to a subject or group of people.
Also I would assume that a lot of the math presented in this book is going to be over most people's heads. It was for me at least, which isn't saying much but again I would wager this will be the case for most people that aren't in the field. I would criticize the author for not boiling down the math to something simpler, but who am I to say that's even possible? Maybe Bhattacharya was doing his best already to simplify everything, which would speak to how brilliant von Neumann and his colleagues were.
I could never settle in with this book because it didn't contain much of a through-line. If you're interested in von Neumann this book does an incredibly thorough job exploring his professional achievements......whether you'll understand them or not........and it spends time talking about a lot of other people too. Like I said, a strange book to review.
PS: I did appreciate learning how much mathematics and philosophy arrive at and tackle the same problems. Very illuminating.
December 23, 2021
My favourite quote from the book:
When he awoke late that night, von Neumann began to prophesy at great speed, stuttering as he did when he was under strain. ‘What we are creating now,’ he told her, 'is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left, yet it would be impossible not to see it through, not only for the military reasons, but it would also be unethical from the point of view of the scientists not to do what they know is feasible, no matter what terrible consequences it may have. And this is only the beginning! The energy source which is now being made available will make scientists the most hated and also the most wanted citizens of any country.'
But then von Neumann abruptly switched from talking about the power of the atom to the power of machines that he thought were ‘going to become not only more important but indispensable’.
“We will be able to go into space way beyond the moon if only people could keep pace with what they create,’ he said. And he worried that if we did not, those same machines could be more dangerous than the bombs he was helping to build.”
April 12, 2022
A real brain who helped make computer brains. I enjoyed the separation of each chapter into a specific discipline that von Neumann chomped into: computers, weapons, game theory, cellular automata. We’re still reeling from his contributions and I’m still working on being able to spout off the ELI5 versions.
July 22, 2022
This is a disappointing book. Not awful, but not good. The Man from the Future manages to take the life of the polymath John von Neumann and to make it dull, never giving us any real sense of the man, although we do get some sense of his accomplishments. Beyond that, it’s filled with bad history about ancillary matters, making the reader wonder about the veracity of core biographical matters. And worst of all, the author, Ananyo Bhattacharya, wastes our time by endlessly trying to shoehorn into von Neumann’s story fantasy contributions by supposedly marginalized people, who are unknown because they did nothing worth noting. All this turns what might have been an excellent book into a chore.
Von Neumann has the reputation of being the smartest of the super-intelligent men who made the twentieth century a technological wonderland. Bhattacharya panders to this perception. He begins the book with an often-heard quote from Edward Teller, wondering if von Neumann talked to men like Teller in the same way as von Neumann talked to Teller’s three-year-old son. The implication is that von Neumann was a unique genius. But although von Neumann was a lot smarter than me, the evidence doesn’t bear out that he was qualitatively different from other geniuses. Moreover, he seems to have, to a great extent, frittered away his talents by never sticking with one field enough to make truly earthshattering contributions. To be sure, being a polymath performing at the highest levels in different (though related) fields, most of them entirely new, is itself impressive. Nonetheless, one wonders whether if von Neumann had stuck with one field he would have accomplished unique feats—or if, on the other hand, he switched among fields seeing that he was not able to achieve unique feats.
Von Neumann was born in 1903 in Budapest. His father, Max, was a well-connected and very successful businessman, part of a wealthy extended family. In 1913, he was awarded a heritable title of minor nobility for services to the government, elevating him socially above the mere bourgeoisie. In Hungary, at that time, people belonging to the nobility, lower or higher, generally had an extra name (praedicatum in Latin) before their family name, theoretically and often actually designating the village where the family had its lands in the past. It is (or was, I presume) generally used only in formal settings, but sometimes it was used more often, especially to differentiate individuals with similar family names. Max chose as his praedicatum “margittai,” that is, “of Margitta,” a town in Transylvania (later stolen by the Rumanians), because his wife’s name was Margit (he had no other connection to the town).
This is where the “von,” a German, not Hungarian, mark of nobility, came from. John von Neumann was born simple Neumann János Lajos, in the Hungarian naming style (family name first). He started using the “von” when studying in Switzerland as a teenager because he wanted to signify to his German classmates he was noble, and the praedicatum was too unwieldy for this. Perhaps giving us a clue to von Neumann’s personality, this was a bit pretentious. Noble titles are rarer in Germany and Austria than they were in Hungary (something like ten percent of the Hungarian population had such titles, which originally exempted the holder from many taxes, and required him to fight).
You’re probably wondering, why does Haywood care about the nuances of von Neumann’s family name? Ah, because this discussion by Bhattacharya struck a chord with me, because my maternal grandfather was also Hungarian minor nobility, something I knew as a young child, and tried to use it (unsuccessfully) to lord over my classmates (some would say I am still trying to lord it over others). His praedicatum was ráczalmási, after Rácalmás, a village south of Budapest. (My family got noble status in 1686 for killing Turks, not, like Max, for economic advice to the state.) I did not inherit; titles do not pass through the female line, although I suppose I could petition Karl von Habsburg to allow the descent, and in fact I got my grandfather, before he died, to sign a paper indicating his desire for this. I doubt I will ever execute this plan, however.
Anyway, back to von Neumann. He was a prodigy as a child, able to multiply large numbers in his head, read voraciously far above his age level, perform feats of memory, and so forth. (Strangely given its association with mathematical genius, he was bad at chess.) His parents aggressively fed his abilities, though his father was skeptical of mathematics as a career, regarding it as not a good way to earn a living, and von Neumann was exposed to social and intellectual life at the highest Budapest levels, with a constant whirl of fascinating dinner guests. It was a charmed life, like much bourgeois city life in turn-of-the-century Central Europe, before it all went wrong.
Still, World War I did not touch the family in any meaningful way. What did touch the family was events after the war, in 1919, when the Communist regime of Béla Kun viciously implemented the standard reign of terror that takes place whenever any Left group gains complete power. Bhattacharya gets most of the details of this Red Terror wrong, and ludicrously claims that the post-Red Terror punishment of the guilty under Miklós Horthy was far worse than the Red Terror. Bizarrely, Bhattacharya even imagines that the aftermath of the Red Terror endangered the family. He says that “The von Neumann’s were spared by Horthy’s forces,” as if there were any chance that a man such as Max von Neumann would be sought for punishment—something Bhattacharya implicitly admits in the same sentence, when he says that “von Neumann’s schooling continued through the [post-Communist] upheaval more or less undisturbed.” No surprise, like most Hungarians, von Neumann became and remained violently opposed to Communism, something that fed his later work with nuclear weapons.
Von Neumann’s education progressed in the European style—excellent teachers at demanding schools. At this same time other Hungarians important in the future were swimming in the same circles, of which more later: Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Paul Erdős, John Kemeny, and Eugene Wigner among them. Von Neumann wrote his first mathematical paper, related to set theory, at seventeen, which he refined a few years later to become his doctoral thesis. Then he moved to Germany, to Göttingen, an important research center for mathematicians, because Germany at that time led the world in all forms of science (America was a backwater). There he met Werner Heisenberg, and involved himself in early development of quantum theory. He wrote a book, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, as well as numerous papers, not only on quantum physics but also on game theory and continuing work in areas related to set theory. Much of this is quite interesting. Throughout the book, to give credit where credit is due, Bhattacharya does a good job explicating complicated mathematic concepts in a way that makes them reasonably comprehensible to the reader.
In 1929, seeking a tenured professorship, von Neumann moved to Hamburg, but in 1930 was lured away by a massive paycheck to lecture at Princeton, in a scheme to use Rockefeller money to kick-start American intellectual progress in mathematics. This was the Institute for Advanced Study, which later also hired Albert Einstein and many other famous scientists. Von Neumann’s move to America had nothing at all to do with a feeling of anti-Semitism (as we will discuss, he was Jewish) or premonitions of future problems in Hungary or Germany; it was just for the money, no doubt in part because von Neumann had just gotten married to his childhood sweetheart. Soon enough, though, it became unwise to return to Germany—Jews were being limited in positions they could get, and some Jews were being fired. This loss was America’s gain, and von Neumann, and a great many other Jews, stayed (or came, if they were not already here).
From then on, von Neumann exhibited his lifelong tendency to bounce around, focusing on different topics and fields that caught his interest. Most notably, somehow he became interested in the mathematical modeling of explosions, in particular shaped charges, which led to his recruitment as a consultant by various segments of the American military. He ended up doing quite a bit of work, albeit not full-time, for the Manhattan Project (the plutonium bomb Fat Man used shaped charges). It was von Neumann who discovered that nuclear blasts maximized destruction (though not fallout) if airburst, and he continued defense work until his death.
That wasn’t all he did in the 1940s and 1950s. He became interested in the new field of computing, being introduced to computers through his defense work, and he worked on the early computers ENIAC and EDVAC. In the late 1940s, he worked on cellular automata—algorithms that simulated life, first on paper, and then with computers (the game “Life” is an example, not created by von Neumann), coming up with the first universal constructor, an algorithm that can replicate itself (and he theorized about what are now called von Neumann probes, self-replicating spacecraft that might be used to explore the vast distances of interstellar space). Unlike most men of the first intellectual rank, whose special abilities and contributions tend to decline after age forty, von Neumann never seemed to slow down, and he involved himself in several other fields. Still, even Bhattacharya sees that von Neumann lacked focus. Mentioning his work on the molecular basis of life, he says “In his usual way, von Neumann dabbled brilliantly, widely and rather inconclusively in the subject but intuitively hit upon a number of ideas that would prove to be fertile areas of research for others.”
He was a difficult man personally. He had distinct signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder, such as always flipping a light switch seven times. In 1937 he and his first wife divorced, supposedly due to his inattention; he remarried a woman who divorced her second husband for him, and seems to have been a gold-digger. Other than these flashes, Bhattacharya gives us little sense of the man, what he thought, what his emotions were. This is most obvious in the author’s inadequate treatment of von Neumann’s illness and death. In 1955 he was diagnosed with metastatic bone cancer, and he died hard in 1957, aged fifty-three. He was terrified of death, and although he returned to practicing his Catholic faith right before the end, it seems to have given him little solace. But Bhattacharya gives us only the most cursory treatment of these matters. Maybe von Neumann left little first-hand evidence of his own thoughts; he does not seem to have been a frequent letter-writer, for example. Still, he was a social man, not a hermit, so a more competent biographer could no doubt have spun a more substantial and interesting story about this and all the other personal elements of von Neumann’s life.
One reason why von Neumann is still remembered, more than peers who were pure mathematicians, is that the things in which he interested himself in the 1940s and 1950s became extremely important technologies later—most notably the computer. As many have pointed out, it is notable how many of these mid-century men who created the technologies that defined the twentieth century were Hungarian Jews, mostly from Budapest. Their joke during the Manhattan Project, where they were very prominent, was that they were Martians, seeded here to help Earth.
I have never found this hugely surprising. As everyone who’s not a science-denier knows, Jews have naturally high average IQs, so you’re starting with a deep pool of talent. You add cultural pressure to excel (similar to Asians today, resulting in similar resentment and similar limitations on advancement put in place by those otherwise shut out). And then you have to realize that Budapest had a very large number of Jews at the turn of the century and onwards. A quarter of Budapest’s entire population was Jewish, and Budapest was by an order of magnitude the largest city in the country. The Jews of Budapest were very integrated into the larger society, and a high percentage converted to Christianity, naturally, tightening their ties with wider society. (Von Neumann’s father did not, but after his death in 1928, he and his brothers all converted to Catholicism.)
Before the war, Jews dominated Hungarian professional and bourgeois groups. They were seventy percent of the journalists in Budapest, for example, and thirty-five percent of those nationwide. (My own great-grandfather was a prominent journalist in Budapest at the turn of the century, who died young of tuberculosis. He wasn’t Jewish, although within our family we did have Jewish intermarriage.) They were eighty percent of those who worked in finance, and not because, in the common myth, finance was where Jews could be employed. They were sixty percent of the doctors in private practice, and these figures continued across the professions. Among this ferment, it seems inevitable that twenty or thirty men, the cream of the crop, all from rich, successful, elite families able to feed their talents, would rise to the top—although simple happenstance, luck, no doubt had something to do with it.
Bhattacharya raises this topic, but botches the analysis. He ascribes much of the Martians’ success to a fear that “the tolerant climate of Hungary might change overnight,” requiring excellence as a protective device. That’s midwit hindsight bias; Bhattacharya offers no contemporaneous evidence of any such fear. Hungary was much less anti-Semitic in the early twentieth century than America, and Jews, like the vast majority of Europeans, simply did not see the catastrophe looming on the horizon (part of the reason why, even in the far more anti-Semitic atmosphere of Germany or Austria, only a few Jews left before it was very late, or too late). Bhattacharya’s claim is akin to the fiction heard more and more in America, variations on “My grandfather volunteered to fight in the war because he wanted to help the Jews.” Sure he did. The reality is that Jews did extremely well in Hungary, attracting more Jews, and in the nature of a statistical distribution some were talented beyond measure.
Beyond the relatively narrow, though important, question of the Martians, it is true (though I am biased) that Hungarians, Jews and otherwise, do seem to punch above their weight (including those who fled after the 1956 revolution). Relative to their population, for a long time Hungarians have been very prominent in chess, certain sports (such as fencing), and Nobel prizes. Maybe part of this is due to the Hungarian personality, which is fond of fighting until the last dog dies. The National Museum in Budapest is filled with canvases of heroic battles which the Hungarians lost, but went down with style. Perhaps this is tied to attitudes that drive less fatal, but still spectacular, achievements. It is hard to say.
Finally, however, let’s talk about the worst fault of this book—its desperate desire to “elevate marginalized voices,” that is, to give undue and unwarranted attention to people of no importance and no accomplishments, who fit into approved identity buckets. Any time any woman scientist appears in this book, she is always praised as a genius (“brilliant” is Bhattacharya’s go-to word for women). For example, one of the thousands of scientists who discussed von Neumann’s book on quantum physics in the 1930s was someone named Grete Hermann, an obscure German who purported to be both a philosopher and mathematician. We are treated to several pages about her, with the usual silly claim that even though her ramblings were ignored at the time, now we know they are incredibly important, although why specifically somehow never seems to make it onto the page.
I’ve written about this annoying authorial phenomenon before, focusing on the fictions that the sister of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Sophia Brunel, was a genius engineer, and that the daughter of Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace, was the first computer programmer. Such lies are everywhere, and fresh ones are piled constantly onto the steaming heap. A few weeks ago a picture was going around Twitter of one Margaret Hamilton, who worked for the Apollo space program, next to a stack of bound printouts as tall as her. The claim was that this was the code she had written for the Apollo program. False. Hamilton (who is still alive) was a mathematician, one of the rare women who had interest and expertise in computer programming. In the late 1950s and early 1960s she bounced around to various government programming jobs. All the accounts about her career with Apollo are pretty vague (which probably means untruths are floating around), and the flavor of falsehood is not helped by that most anecdotes of supposedly important work done by Hamilton were offered only by Hamilton herself, and then parroted by a sympathetic audience. But it appears she was hired as an Apollo programmer, and then put in bureaucratic charge of a programming team. Thus, the stack of documents was work done by other programmers, which she had coordinated, not written by her at all. A decent work effort, but nothing particularly notable, or superior to the work done by thousands of men working on Apollo. Yet you can be sure that soon NASA will name buildings after her, schools will exalt her, and men will be told to know their place while the real geniuses of history are unveiled.
The most expansive pack of such lies is that portrayed in the book and later movie "Hidden Figures" . . . [review completes as first comment].
Von Neumann has the reputation of being the smartest of the super-intelligent men who made the twentieth century a technological wonderland. Bhattacharya panders to this perception. He begins the book with an often-heard quote from Edward Teller, wondering if von Neumann talked to men like Teller in the same way as von Neumann talked to Teller’s three-year-old son. The implication is that von Neumann was a unique genius. But although von Neumann was a lot smarter than me, the evidence doesn’t bear out that he was qualitatively different from other geniuses. Moreover, he seems to have, to a great extent, frittered away his talents by never sticking with one field enough to make truly earthshattering contributions. To be sure, being a polymath performing at the highest levels in different (though related) fields, most of them entirely new, is itself impressive. Nonetheless, one wonders whether if von Neumann had stuck with one field he would have accomplished unique feats—or if, on the other hand, he switched among fields seeing that he was not able to achieve unique feats.
Von Neumann was born in 1903 in Budapest. His father, Max, was a well-connected and very successful businessman, part of a wealthy extended family. In 1913, he was awarded a heritable title of minor nobility for services to the government, elevating him socially above the mere bourgeoisie. In Hungary, at that time, people belonging to the nobility, lower or higher, generally had an extra name (praedicatum in Latin) before their family name, theoretically and often actually designating the village where the family had its lands in the past. It is (or was, I presume) generally used only in formal settings, but sometimes it was used more often, especially to differentiate individuals with similar family names. Max chose as his praedicatum “margittai,” that is, “of Margitta,” a town in Transylvania (later stolen by the Rumanians), because his wife’s name was Margit (he had no other connection to the town).
This is where the “von,” a German, not Hungarian, mark of nobility, came from. John von Neumann was born simple Neumann János Lajos, in the Hungarian naming style (family name first). He started using the “von” when studying in Switzerland as a teenager because he wanted to signify to his German classmates he was noble, and the praedicatum was too unwieldy for this. Perhaps giving us a clue to von Neumann’s personality, this was a bit pretentious. Noble titles are rarer in Germany and Austria than they were in Hungary (something like ten percent of the Hungarian population had such titles, which originally exempted the holder from many taxes, and required him to fight).
You’re probably wondering, why does Haywood care about the nuances of von Neumann’s family name? Ah, because this discussion by Bhattacharya struck a chord with me, because my maternal grandfather was also Hungarian minor nobility, something I knew as a young child, and tried to use it (unsuccessfully) to lord over my classmates (some would say I am still trying to lord it over others). His praedicatum was ráczalmási, after Rácalmás, a village south of Budapest. (My family got noble status in 1686 for killing Turks, not, like Max, for economic advice to the state.) I did not inherit; titles do not pass through the female line, although I suppose I could petition Karl von Habsburg to allow the descent, and in fact I got my grandfather, before he died, to sign a paper indicating his desire for this. I doubt I will ever execute this plan, however.
Anyway, back to von Neumann. He was a prodigy as a child, able to multiply large numbers in his head, read voraciously far above his age level, perform feats of memory, and so forth. (Strangely given its association with mathematical genius, he was bad at chess.) His parents aggressively fed his abilities, though his father was skeptical of mathematics as a career, regarding it as not a good way to earn a living, and von Neumann was exposed to social and intellectual life at the highest Budapest levels, with a constant whirl of fascinating dinner guests. It was a charmed life, like much bourgeois city life in turn-of-the-century Central Europe, before it all went wrong.
Still, World War I did not touch the family in any meaningful way. What did touch the family was events after the war, in 1919, when the Communist regime of Béla Kun viciously implemented the standard reign of terror that takes place whenever any Left group gains complete power. Bhattacharya gets most of the details of this Red Terror wrong, and ludicrously claims that the post-Red Terror punishment of the guilty under Miklós Horthy was far worse than the Red Terror. Bizarrely, Bhattacharya even imagines that the aftermath of the Red Terror endangered the family. He says that “The von Neumann’s were spared by Horthy’s forces,” as if there were any chance that a man such as Max von Neumann would be sought for punishment—something Bhattacharya implicitly admits in the same sentence, when he says that “von Neumann’s schooling continued through the [post-Communist] upheaval more or less undisturbed.” No surprise, like most Hungarians, von Neumann became and remained violently opposed to Communism, something that fed his later work with nuclear weapons.
Von Neumann’s education progressed in the European style—excellent teachers at demanding schools. At this same time other Hungarians important in the future were swimming in the same circles, of which more later: Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Paul Erdős, John Kemeny, and Eugene Wigner among them. Von Neumann wrote his first mathematical paper, related to set theory, at seventeen, which he refined a few years later to become his doctoral thesis. Then he moved to Germany, to Göttingen, an important research center for mathematicians, because Germany at that time led the world in all forms of science (America was a backwater). There he met Werner Heisenberg, and involved himself in early development of quantum theory. He wrote a book, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, as well as numerous papers, not only on quantum physics but also on game theory and continuing work in areas related to set theory. Much of this is quite interesting. Throughout the book, to give credit where credit is due, Bhattacharya does a good job explicating complicated mathematic concepts in a way that makes them reasonably comprehensible to the reader.
In 1929, seeking a tenured professorship, von Neumann moved to Hamburg, but in 1930 was lured away by a massive paycheck to lecture at Princeton, in a scheme to use Rockefeller money to kick-start American intellectual progress in mathematics. This was the Institute for Advanced Study, which later also hired Albert Einstein and many other famous scientists. Von Neumann’s move to America had nothing at all to do with a feeling of anti-Semitism (as we will discuss, he was Jewish) or premonitions of future problems in Hungary or Germany; it was just for the money, no doubt in part because von Neumann had just gotten married to his childhood sweetheart. Soon enough, though, it became unwise to return to Germany—Jews were being limited in positions they could get, and some Jews were being fired. This loss was America’s gain, and von Neumann, and a great many other Jews, stayed (or came, if they were not already here).
From then on, von Neumann exhibited his lifelong tendency to bounce around, focusing on different topics and fields that caught his interest. Most notably, somehow he became interested in the mathematical modeling of explosions, in particular shaped charges, which led to his recruitment as a consultant by various segments of the American military. He ended up doing quite a bit of work, albeit not full-time, for the Manhattan Project (the plutonium bomb Fat Man used shaped charges). It was von Neumann who discovered that nuclear blasts maximized destruction (though not fallout) if airburst, and he continued defense work until his death.
That wasn’t all he did in the 1940s and 1950s. He became interested in the new field of computing, being introduced to computers through his defense work, and he worked on the early computers ENIAC and EDVAC. In the late 1940s, he worked on cellular automata—algorithms that simulated life, first on paper, and then with computers (the game “Life” is an example, not created by von Neumann), coming up with the first universal constructor, an algorithm that can replicate itself (and he theorized about what are now called von Neumann probes, self-replicating spacecraft that might be used to explore the vast distances of interstellar space). Unlike most men of the first intellectual rank, whose special abilities and contributions tend to decline after age forty, von Neumann never seemed to slow down, and he involved himself in several other fields. Still, even Bhattacharya sees that von Neumann lacked focus. Mentioning his work on the molecular basis of life, he says “In his usual way, von Neumann dabbled brilliantly, widely and rather inconclusively in the subject but intuitively hit upon a number of ideas that would prove to be fertile areas of research for others.”
He was a difficult man personally. He had distinct signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder, such as always flipping a light switch seven times. In 1937 he and his first wife divorced, supposedly due to his inattention; he remarried a woman who divorced her second husband for him, and seems to have been a gold-digger. Other than these flashes, Bhattacharya gives us little sense of the man, what he thought, what his emotions were. This is most obvious in the author’s inadequate treatment of von Neumann’s illness and death. In 1955 he was diagnosed with metastatic bone cancer, and he died hard in 1957, aged fifty-three. He was terrified of death, and although he returned to practicing his Catholic faith right before the end, it seems to have given him little solace. But Bhattacharya gives us only the most cursory treatment of these matters. Maybe von Neumann left little first-hand evidence of his own thoughts; he does not seem to have been a frequent letter-writer, for example. Still, he was a social man, not a hermit, so a more competent biographer could no doubt have spun a more substantial and interesting story about this and all the other personal elements of von Neumann’s life.
One reason why von Neumann is still remembered, more than peers who were pure mathematicians, is that the things in which he interested himself in the 1940s and 1950s became extremely important technologies later—most notably the computer. As many have pointed out, it is notable how many of these mid-century men who created the technologies that defined the twentieth century were Hungarian Jews, mostly from Budapest. Their joke during the Manhattan Project, where they were very prominent, was that they were Martians, seeded here to help Earth.
I have never found this hugely surprising. As everyone who’s not a science-denier knows, Jews have naturally high average IQs, so you’re starting with a deep pool of talent. You add cultural pressure to excel (similar to Asians today, resulting in similar resentment and similar limitations on advancement put in place by those otherwise shut out). And then you have to realize that Budapest had a very large number of Jews at the turn of the century and onwards. A quarter of Budapest’s entire population was Jewish, and Budapest was by an order of magnitude the largest city in the country. The Jews of Budapest were very integrated into the larger society, and a high percentage converted to Christianity, naturally, tightening their ties with wider society. (Von Neumann’s father did not, but after his death in 1928, he and his brothers all converted to Catholicism.)
Before the war, Jews dominated Hungarian professional and bourgeois groups. They were seventy percent of the journalists in Budapest, for example, and thirty-five percent of those nationwide. (My own great-grandfather was a prominent journalist in Budapest at the turn of the century, who died young of tuberculosis. He wasn’t Jewish, although within our family we did have Jewish intermarriage.) They were eighty percent of those who worked in finance, and not because, in the common myth, finance was where Jews could be employed. They were sixty percent of the doctors in private practice, and these figures continued across the professions. Among this ferment, it seems inevitable that twenty or thirty men, the cream of the crop, all from rich, successful, elite families able to feed their talents, would rise to the top—although simple happenstance, luck, no doubt had something to do with it.
Bhattacharya raises this topic, but botches the analysis. He ascribes much of the Martians’ success to a fear that “the tolerant climate of Hungary might change overnight,” requiring excellence as a protective device. That’s midwit hindsight bias; Bhattacharya offers no contemporaneous evidence of any such fear. Hungary was much less anti-Semitic in the early twentieth century than America, and Jews, like the vast majority of Europeans, simply did not see the catastrophe looming on the horizon (part of the reason why, even in the far more anti-Semitic atmosphere of Germany or Austria, only a few Jews left before it was very late, or too late). Bhattacharya’s claim is akin to the fiction heard more and more in America, variations on “My grandfather volunteered to fight in the war because he wanted to help the Jews.” Sure he did. The reality is that Jews did extremely well in Hungary, attracting more Jews, and in the nature of a statistical distribution some were talented beyond measure.
Beyond the relatively narrow, though important, question of the Martians, it is true (though I am biased) that Hungarians, Jews and otherwise, do seem to punch above their weight (including those who fled after the 1956 revolution). Relative to their population, for a long time Hungarians have been very prominent in chess, certain sports (such as fencing), and Nobel prizes. Maybe part of this is due to the Hungarian personality, which is fond of fighting until the last dog dies. The National Museum in Budapest is filled with canvases of heroic battles which the Hungarians lost, but went down with style. Perhaps this is tied to attitudes that drive less fatal, but still spectacular, achievements. It is hard to say.
Finally, however, let’s talk about the worst fault of this book—its desperate desire to “elevate marginalized voices,” that is, to give undue and unwarranted attention to people of no importance and no accomplishments, who fit into approved identity buckets. Any time any woman scientist appears in this book, she is always praised as a genius (“brilliant” is Bhattacharya’s go-to word for women). For example, one of the thousands of scientists who discussed von Neumann’s book on quantum physics in the 1930s was someone named Grete Hermann, an obscure German who purported to be both a philosopher and mathematician. We are treated to several pages about her, with the usual silly claim that even though her ramblings were ignored at the time, now we know they are incredibly important, although why specifically somehow never seems to make it onto the page.
I’ve written about this annoying authorial phenomenon before, focusing on the fictions that the sister of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Sophia Brunel, was a genius engineer, and that the daughter of Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace, was the first computer programmer. Such lies are everywhere, and fresh ones are piled constantly onto the steaming heap. A few weeks ago a picture was going around Twitter of one Margaret Hamilton, who worked for the Apollo space program, next to a stack of bound printouts as tall as her. The claim was that this was the code she had written for the Apollo program. False. Hamilton (who is still alive) was a mathematician, one of the rare women who had interest and expertise in computer programming. In the late 1950s and early 1960s she bounced around to various government programming jobs. All the accounts about her career with Apollo are pretty vague (which probably means untruths are floating around), and the flavor of falsehood is not helped by that most anecdotes of supposedly important work done by Hamilton were offered only by Hamilton herself, and then parroted by a sympathetic audience. But it appears she was hired as an Apollo programmer, and then put in bureaucratic charge of a programming team. Thus, the stack of documents was work done by other programmers, which she had coordinated, not written by her at all. A decent work effort, but nothing particularly notable, or superior to the work done by thousands of men working on Apollo. Yet you can be sure that soon NASA will name buildings after her, schools will exalt her, and men will be told to know their place while the real geniuses of history are unveiled.
The most expansive pack of such lies is that portrayed in the book and later movie "Hidden Figures" . . . [review completes as first comment].
December 24, 2022
John von Neumann was a smart guy. And this book paints a vivid portrait of the man, replete with sometimes funny anecdotes about his driving habits, his marital life and his outgoing nature.
The picture that emerges is a bit rounded off at the most exposed edges, but captures the individual in his moments of generosity and philanthropy, his moments of genius: quantum physics, the Manhattan Project and the architecture of computer processors, but also in his moments of folly: strained relationships with those close to him and at times utter neglect of other people, or projects that produced underwhelming results.
He was a fast thinker and applied his mathematical logic to very diverse problems, which gave him the possibility to bring substantial contributions to very diverse fields. As a defining character trait, the book insists on the dichotomy between his generous nature in his personal relationships and his cool calculating mind when working on social issues at the planetary scale.
The book's conclusion borrows a lot of ideas from his 1955 essay Can We Survive Technology to remind us that technological progress can do both indelible harm and immense good, and that it's up to us to continuously make sure that we keep the world in balance. A fitting conclusion, even if it's a rather safe one.
The picture that emerges is a bit rounded off at the most exposed edges, but captures the individual in his moments of generosity and philanthropy, his moments of genius: quantum physics, the Manhattan Project and the architecture of computer processors, but also in his moments of folly: strained relationships with those close to him and at times utter neglect of other people, or projects that produced underwhelming results.
He was a fast thinker and applied his mathematical logic to very diverse problems, which gave him the possibility to bring substantial contributions to very diverse fields. As a defining character trait, the book insists on the dichotomy between his generous nature in his personal relationships and his cool calculating mind when working on social issues at the planetary scale.
The book's conclusion borrows a lot of ideas from his 1955 essay Can We Survive Technology to remind us that technological progress can do both indelible harm and immense good, and that it's up to us to continuously make sure that we keep the world in balance. A fitting conclusion, even if it's a rather safe one.
July 6, 2022
This short biography is well worth your time. Neumann is a fascinating character. Bhattacharya describes Neumann as the smart one in a room filled with other luminaries like Bohr, Einstein, and others. A professor of mine once described him as the last person who knew all math. That sounds about right. He spent his later adolescence and early adulthood working on number theory (perhaps privately even beating Godel to some of his proofs about the foundations of math) and doing foundational work on quantum theory. (Fun fact: the uncertainty around particle states shows up in the equations in the form of matrices (multiplication of which is not transitive). In order to make progress, the physicists and mathematicians in Germany used the newish matrix algebra developed in England. This is now a standard subject for undergrads. After reading a few books on the history of math, I am continually surprised at how late various mathematical ideas have been developed.)
The most fascinating part of Neumann's life was his work in the 1940s, in which he solidified the foundations of game theory and utility theory, worked on developing the explosive structure that would implode the nuclear core in the first atom bombs, and helped develop the architecture for modern computing. Before dying he developed the idea of automata, which is just one other subject area that has had a life of its own.
Some of the writing that set the context for Neumann's contributions could have been tightened up, but overall this is a great book about a very interesting man.
The most fascinating part of Neumann's life was his work in the 1940s, in which he solidified the foundations of game theory and utility theory, worked on developing the explosive structure that would implode the nuclear core in the first atom bombs, and helped develop the architecture for modern computing. Before dying he developed the idea of automata, which is just one other subject area that has had a life of its own.
Some of the writing that set the context for Neumann's contributions could have been tightened up, but overall this is a great book about a very interesting man.
October 9, 2022
I have been looking for a book about jvn for years! It's not a long book, and the life of jvn is interleaved with long pieces that explains the broader context of his work. I think this is the correct way to deal with things, as jvn dealt with quantum mechanics, foundations of math, game theory, the atomic bomb, automata and a other huge areas of work. So context is good. It also seems that there isn't really that much information about his life other than what we have through papers and publicly available records. Might explain why there hasn't been written a book about jvn before now.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 295 reviews