> Budapest around 1900 produced an absurd cluster of minds: von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Paul Erdős, Theodore von Kármán, George Pólya.
Not to mention Nikola Tesla about 20 years prior.
> When several of them turned up at Los Alamos and realized they had gone to high school together, Szilard joked that Hungary was a cover story for a Martian landing.
What if there actually are people who go to Mars in the future but regret it and the only way for them to come back to Earth is to invent a time machine and be reborn as a mathematical supergenius. That would explain this at least:
> At six, Janos (the OG hungarian name for Johnny) could divide eight-digit numbers in his head and hold a conversation in ancient Greek. He later added Latin, French, German, English, and Yiddish. The rumor was that he remembered everything he ever read. Many years later Herman Goldstine decided to test this by asking him to recite "A Tale of Two Cities." Von Neumann started on chapter one and had to be asked to stop fifteen minutes later.
show comments
willguest
I recently read 'Maniac' by Benjamin Labatut, which also tracks the life of Johnny von Neumann. It is a wonderful read - very eloquently put together, giving accounts of the man from the perspectives of several people in his life.
Not only does it capture the alien-like genius of the protagonist, but also described his particular emotional and social character in a way that I have not seen written elsewhere. Highly recommended.
show comments
diskzero
Any cognitive scientists here, or actual people with eidetic memory, who can comment how the brain would store everything you ever read or heard and how it can be recalled? What does it feel like to be able to recall and recite the entire text of a Tale of Two Cities?
show comments
cadamsdotcom
What beautiful writing. I had no idea JVN did so many things..
"Can we survive technology?" got me thinking about our industry's upheaval. Software engineering's receiving the disruption it so proudly inflicted on other industries.. not reaping what it sowed; rather just the natural order of things.
Acceptance and moving with change is all that can work. Obstructing; denying; ignoring progress.. you'll lose your edge, your relevance, your value to others, and your job. Progress won't wait for us to like it. We must move fast enough to survive change.
Junior engineers for example? Suddenly too junior to be hired? Great! They, and you, can access multiple answer boxes with every PhD ever, and with a bit of creativity, they can leverage that. The best will survive on their own - the rest we should help along. Let's create tools and structures and institutions and help junior engineers finish their education to marketable levels. Let's help them find efficiencies and get there in the same duration. We shouldn't compel companies to preserve a hiring pipeline; now should we incrementally upgrade university educations. Better to go to kids in schools & universities and stimulate their creativity, get them using new tools in new ways, finding efficiencies - because that's what today and tomorrow's jobs will be about. Institutions will adopt the good ideas in time.
We have a responsibility to invest in - and invent - ways of bringing people along.
henrik_w
I read The man From the Future a few years ago, and I highly recommend it!
John von Neumann was such a fascinating and influential character. If you are interested in the modern history of mathematics, computers, game theory and more, pick up a copy.
Was not expecting to see some LLM tells in Murat's writing, although it's clearly been heavily hand-edited.
olooney
Big fan of VnM theorem, which this article alludes to in passing. I think it asks a really great question: "can we make good decisions under uncertainty?" And the answer turns out to be "Yes" with some caveats.
paulpauper
He advocated an immediate preemptive nuclear strike on the USSR: "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?"
This is why he was dismissed in so far as foreign policy was concerned, where nuance and patience takes precedence over cold, calculating game theory. Not only would it not have been feasible (Russia is huge), but it would have led to follow on effects by possibly pulling the US into potentially another world war. This is evidence you can be a genius in some areas and wrong in others.
show comments
sashank_1509
I suspect some of these anecdotes are false, 15 mins of tale of two cities, 8 digit division in your head?
This gives a sense of embellishment by a clueless layman who think very smart people can memorize every single thing they ever do. Computers memorize well, very smart humans, it’s not clear if they memorize any better than a man of the street. I was struck by a fields medalist recent comment that he sometimes struggle remembering proofs he wrote himself in the past.
show comments
nsonha
I instantly lose respect to any man that "drove crowded roads like a maniac, and got bored and slowed down on open ones. He wrecked a car roughly every year"
show comments
jongjong
> And most of the world is not zero-sum...
That is a strange thing to say, especially now.
Clearly, there is a reason Von Neumann spent so much time on this 'zero-sum' formulation of the problem, specifically in economics. Clearly he must have believed this was representative to a significant extent, especially given his interest in pragmatic problems.
It would make no sense for an intelligent person to work on an economics problem which doesn't model reality.
show comments
FLeXMurphy
> Johnny remained a game theorist to the end. After a lifetime of culturally Jewish atheism, he asked to be baptized. His daughter attributed it to Pascal's Wager: a small probability of a much better afterlife, against a trivial cost.
The house always wins.
show comments
bangatrick
that's my man
jamesjolliffe
Article spends the first 95% establishing JVN as a mythologically intelligent person. Then the last paragraph suggesting he would want to ban AI.
So much content out there atm nudging very hard for AI regulation.
I always recommend Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe[0] by George Dyson when John von Neumann comes up, it's a fabulous read.
[0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/44425/turings-cathe...
> Budapest around 1900 produced an absurd cluster of minds: von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Paul Erdős, Theodore von Kármán, George Pólya.
Not to mention Nikola Tesla about 20 years prior.
> When several of them turned up at Los Alamos and realized they had gone to high school together, Szilard joked that Hungary was a cover story for a Martian landing.
What if there actually are people who go to Mars in the future but regret it and the only way for them to come back to Earth is to invent a time machine and be reborn as a mathematical supergenius. That would explain this at least:
> At six, Janos (the OG hungarian name for Johnny) could divide eight-digit numbers in his head and hold a conversation in ancient Greek. He later added Latin, French, German, English, and Yiddish. The rumor was that he remembered everything he ever read. Many years later Herman Goldstine decided to test this by asking him to recite "A Tale of Two Cities." Von Neumann started on chapter one and had to be asked to stop fifteen minutes later.
I recently read 'Maniac' by Benjamin Labatut, which also tracks the life of Johnny von Neumann. It is a wonderful read - very eloquently put together, giving accounts of the man from the perspectives of several people in his life.
Not only does it capture the alien-like genius of the protagonist, but also described his particular emotional and social character in a way that I have not seen written elsewhere. Highly recommended.
Any cognitive scientists here, or actual people with eidetic memory, who can comment how the brain would store everything you ever read or heard and how it can be recalled? What does it feel like to be able to recall and recite the entire text of a Tale of Two Cities?
What beautiful writing. I had no idea JVN did so many things..
"Can we survive technology?" got me thinking about our industry's upheaval. Software engineering's receiving the disruption it so proudly inflicted on other industries.. not reaping what it sowed; rather just the natural order of things.
Acceptance and moving with change is all that can work. Obstructing; denying; ignoring progress.. you'll lose your edge, your relevance, your value to others, and your job. Progress won't wait for us to like it. We must move fast enough to survive change.
Junior engineers for example? Suddenly too junior to be hired? Great! They, and you, can access multiple answer boxes with every PhD ever, and with a bit of creativity, they can leverage that. The best will survive on their own - the rest we should help along. Let's create tools and structures and institutions and help junior engineers finish their education to marketable levels. Let's help them find efficiencies and get there in the same duration. We shouldn't compel companies to preserve a hiring pipeline; now should we incrementally upgrade university educations. Better to go to kids in schools & universities and stimulate their creativity, get them using new tools in new ways, finding efficiencies - because that's what today and tomorrow's jobs will be about. Institutions will adopt the good ideas in time.
We have a responsibility to invest in - and invent - ways of bringing people along.
I read The man From the Future a few years ago, and I highly recommend it! John von Neumann was such a fascinating and influential character. If you are interested in the modern history of mathematics, computers, game theory and more, pick up a copy.
I also wrote about why I liked the book so much:
https://henrikwarne.com/2024/07/07/john-von-neumann-the-man-...
Was not expecting to see some LLM tells in Murat's writing, although it's clearly been heavily hand-edited.
Big fan of VnM theorem, which this article alludes to in passing. I think it asks a really great question: "can we make good decisions under uncertainty?" And the answer turns out to be "Yes" with some caveats.
He advocated an immediate preemptive nuclear strike on the USSR: "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?"
This is why he was dismissed in so far as foreign policy was concerned, where nuance and patience takes precedence over cold, calculating game theory. Not only would it not have been feasible (Russia is huge), but it would have led to follow on effects by possibly pulling the US into potentially another world war. This is evidence you can be a genius in some areas and wrong in others.
I suspect some of these anecdotes are false, 15 mins of tale of two cities, 8 digit division in your head?
This gives a sense of embellishment by a clueless layman who think very smart people can memorize every single thing they ever do. Computers memorize well, very smart humans, it’s not clear if they memorize any better than a man of the street. I was struck by a fields medalist recent comment that he sometimes struggle remembering proofs he wrote himself in the past.
I instantly lose respect to any man that "drove crowded roads like a maniac, and got bored and slowed down on open ones. He wrecked a car roughly every year"
> And most of the world is not zero-sum...
That is a strange thing to say, especially now.
Clearly, there is a reason Von Neumann spent so much time on this 'zero-sum' formulation of the problem, specifically in economics. Clearly he must have believed this was representative to a significant extent, especially given his interest in pragmatic problems.
It would make no sense for an intelligent person to work on an economics problem which doesn't model reality.
> Johnny remained a game theorist to the end. After a lifetime of culturally Jewish atheism, he asked to be baptized. His daughter attributed it to Pascal's Wager: a small probability of a much better afterlife, against a trivial cost.
The house always wins.
that's my man
Article spends the first 95% establishing JVN as a mythologically intelligent person. Then the last paragraph suggesting he would want to ban AI.
So much content out there atm nudging very hard for AI regulation.