The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann (2019)
cantorsparadise.com
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Well, he actually described an already existing design by Eckert and Mauchly under his name and this paper was illegally disclosed. For the ones interested in this and other fascinating stories about ENIAC, here is a good book: https://www.amazon.com/Eniac-Triumphs-Tragedies-Worlds-Compu...; worth reading is also the review by Jean Bartik (here https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3K2DSB6UE1X7H/re...) who was there and witnessed everything firsthand.
Jean Bartik was a hugely biased source who used personal recollection to quarrel with anyone who offered any view of computer history that didn't put ENIAC front and center. She seems to have spent the latter part of her life writing strident negative Amazon reviews of any book which didn't place Eckert and Mauchly and the ENIAC as the primary source of all computer innovation. Her reviews [1] of Who Invented the Computer? The Legal Battle That Changed Computing History in particular were extremely negative personal attacks on the author and her husband (Alice and Arthur Burks) for having written books which dared question ENIAC's supremacy.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2MERA4EUZ8M17
He was creating frameworks for understanding self-replicating systems before the nature of DNA had been determined.
Is there a defitive book or wiki page for the whole thing regarding: * Von Neumann's actual contribution to the so-called von Neumann architecture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the...
This seems more vague than what have been disclosed here...
Eckert summarizes this condemnatory as follows on p.35: "You know, we finally regarded von Neuman as a huckster of other people's ideas with Goldstine as his principle mission salesman. Now, if you don't believe this, talk to Julian Biglow at the Institute for Advanced Study(…) Von Neumann was stealing ideas and trying to pretend work done at the Moore School was work he had done."
[1] Oral history interview with J. Presper Eckert conducted by Nancy Stern, 1977: https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107275
PDF: https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107275/oh...
But certainly those were days (if indeed we have left them) when 'great men' like him could and would take credit for something like that for reasons of pride and posterity.
However, there is a problem with this: As I understand it, IBM wasn't that interested in computers at the time and actually stumbled into (electronic digital) computing by a government contract for replicating Whirlwind for the Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE). On the other hand, Eckert also pointed out some interest shown repeatedly by von Neumann in bringing in commercial third parties into the project, so it may have been concerning any third party which may be interested in his consultancy, and this then became historically IBM.
IBM was developing electromechanical computers and for a few years the electromechanical IBM SSEC (operating since January 1948) was the fastest computer with stored program, solving many important problems for the US government and for various companies.
After their competitor Remington Rand introduced the first commercial electronic computers (UNIVAC), IBM also entered this market very quickly with a few commercial models (IBM 701 & IBM 702), then also with the faster electronic computers made for the US military, in the NORC and SAGE projects.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210407045457/https://www.amazo...
Remember personal websites and blogs? Barely anybody runs them anymore.
Archive Team is doing amazing work, and we need to support them.
People seem to forget about the "save" functionality included in every web browser for some reason. You should save anything you deem important enough if you fear it might be gone one day. This is no different from acquiring a copy of an important book for your own shelf.
Where would you prefer this comment to reside? Where would it have lived before the web?
It's interesting that the Z3 was denied funding from the German gov't for not being war-important. It turns out they were ahead of the computing game and squandered it, as US and GB relied on computers for code breaking and performing calculations for developing the atom bomb.
It's not a blunder to the tune of invading Russia, but it's still interesting.
Plus it makes even less sense when ww2 Germany is almost always believed to have been way ahead of the allies technologically. Way more than they actually were, so unless the allies were veryyy bad at rewriting history to erase Germany's contributions... I'd probably guess It's more due to it being a very obscure technology and had almost no "cool" factor, and v. little influence on the overall technology compared to the V-2 or jet fighters
I can really recommend the book "ENIAC in Action" on this matter and of course on the ENIAC generally.
"The Z3 was demonstrated in 1998 to be, in principle, Turing-complete. However, because it lacked conditional branching, the Z3 only meets this definition by speculatively computing all possible outcomes of a calculation."
The only "positive" (depeding on perspective) effect of his illegal and morally questionable action was that the patent was declared null and void due to the novelty-damaging effect of his report, among other issues supporting this outcome. The computers however did not become more "open source" because of this, just cheaper.
Patents are legally enforced monopolies after all.
> "Originally we called ENIAC the "MANIAC" when it didn't work right. And later they borrowed that name for some other actual machine. But if you worked for von Neumann on the MANIAC, then if you invented something it belonged to you. Well, on some relatively short notice, like it might have been a week, or a month, or something, a short time before the deadlines hit, von Neumann went down and published all that stuff. All the reports of the engineers went to the Library of Congress which put a bar on any patents being obtained by any of his employees. And when they complained about it to him, he just said, "Well, that's tough; that's the way I think; that stuff should be in the public domain." Now there is a perfectly obvious reason for this. He was consulting with people like IBM. If the things weren't patented that would be a problem for IBM. The idea was he was selling ideas to other people...if it wasn't covered by patents, he would have been selling something they couldn't use. They would have come back and said, now, "what kind of a consultant are you, coming up with new ideas which are already patented by others and we can't use them." But if these ideas could come under the public domain, then he could go around and sell them to people. That was his game."
[1] Oral history interview with J. Presper Eckert (1977): https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107275
There is absolutely no doubt that without this publication and with a patent claiming the design of a computer with stored program, the evolution of the computers would have been much slower.
Whoever pushed the report to be published did a huge service to everybody else but Eckert and Mauchly.
Also, Eckert and his coworkers were deluded if they thought they could have gained anything by having a patent on the stored-program computer.
Nobody prevented them to build good computers even without a patent, but they did not have the intellectual and financial resources to do much until they were bought by Remington Rand, which lead to the introduction of UNIVAC in 1951.
If they had a patent, the result would have been that Remington Rand would have had a monopoly on the computer market, with inferior products, and all the great advances in computers that have been done in other places, like NIST, MIT or IBM, would have happened only many years later.
I have read both the von Neumann report, which is a model of clarity, and all the early documents that remain from Eckert, Mauchly et al.
It is likely that they already had some ideas about stored-program computers, but there is no doubt that their ideas were very confused.
Von Neumann distinguished what was right from what was wrong in their ideas, then clarified, organized and completed all those concepts and synthesized them in a coherent theory that could be easily understood and used by anyone else.
The contribution of von Neumann is much more important than Eckert tries to imply.
Moreover, while Eckert and al. were upset that their own contributions were not acknowledged as well as they should have been, they also failed to acknowledge the important ideas about electronic computers that they themselves have taken from Atanasoff, without ever mentioning him.
Unlike Eckert and al., but like von Neumann, Atanasoff was also someone able to express very clearly his concepts, so you could easily learn from him. For example a report about the classification of computer memories, written by Atanasoff at the beginning of WWII, was extremely advanced for those days (Atanasoff invented what is now called DRAM).
Even if the transistors have been patented, the patents have been licensed to anyone for negligible fees or even for free (e.g. for hearing aids).
If the essential transistor patents had been used like worthless patents are used today in preventing competition, the history of the computer and electronics industries would have been very different, with progress delayed by decades.
So both the publication of the von Neumann report and the generous handling of the transistor patents have been very influential in shaping the word of today, while many inventions where the inventors clinged to the patents have been either doomed or they began to be used only after the patents have expired, more than 20 years later.
To be fair, Mauchly proposed combined program and data storage in a mercury delay line, much like it was done on the UNIVAC I, in 1945, before von Neumann arrived. (Allegedly, there had been ideas for stored program in the ENIAC group even earlier than this.) Mauchly also invented Short Code (1949, originally named Brief Code), the first programming language used in production, and the Critical Path Method for automatic scheduling. The group around Maurice Wilkes attended his 1946 lectures on the design of digital computers and went from there to build the EDSAC, the very first modern computer.
It is clearly a very personal and biased account, but I think there are good reasons to believe many of the things she is saying, even when they go against the commonly accepted history "written by the winners".
PDF: https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107275/oh...
Though frequently quoted as evidence that von Neumann favoured a first strike "preventive war" against the Soviet Union, this is a weak reed on which to build such a claim. It seems more likely it was characteristic - though tasteless and bloodthirsty - banter designed to emphasise his hawkishness. ...
Von Neumann was not an unthinking militarist: he believed that the world's only chance of avoiding destructive conflict was world government, but - since he could not see any practical way of achieving this - he was determined to defend his adopted country with as much armed might as possible. "
http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~hwolkowi//neumann1.html
Unlike Teller, von Neumann is not renowned for what you describe as "persistent advocacy" of nuclear first strike. AFAIK, von Neumann was not especially politically active in promoting US gov't aggression of any kind, again, unlike Teller.
The last time we had a debate on HN on this topic a number of people seemed to think it would have been a good idea - which I found genuinely disturbing. Hopefully I was just being trolled.
Now you might be overestimating the US nuclear arsenal at the time, remember he died in 1957. At the time a nuclear exchange could have killed a lot of people, but only on the scale of a major bombing campaign not glassing the country.
As such, assuming US attacked and occupied Russia after an early nuclear exchange, it would have been war but not fit the definition of genocide because the intent to destroy a people simply wasn’t there.
PS: One of the less well known examples, the US forcibly sending American Indian children to boarding schools to be Americanized actually fits the UN definition of genocide. That’s the heart of the issue, the intent to destroy a people or culture rather than say conquest or even retaliation.
Edit: I suspect maximum lethality of the US stockpile would have been during the 1960s when they still used large numbers of very large and dirty weapons.
Thus, even 10 million dead in 1950 seems very high unless they simply tried to maximize civilian casualties which it’s self would reasonably qualify as genocide. And again Russia lost ~27 million people in WWII and it isn’t considered a genocide of Russia so numbers alone while horrific don’t qualify.
In the end the world avoided a large scale nuclear exchange, but when faced with a seemingly like war between two nuclear armed superpowers I can understand the argument.
"The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts.
I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that it referred to."
https://apjjf.org/-Daniel-Ellsberg/3222/article.html
Edit: The staggering thing about the estimate of 600 million dead was that this was known to be an underestimate as the US didn't take the thermal effects of nuclear weapons into account during planning as they were regarded as too unpredictable. Actual 'real' estimates would be over a billion dead....
Seems more or less a tie to me. [0] Especially compared to this chap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Car...
[0] Actually, it's not a tie: If you add the entries on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conjectures_by_Paul_Er... you get a clear winner.
The Eckert group had some rather vague ideas about the architecture of their future computer, the successor of ENIAC, and those ideas certainly included some kind of stored program (not necessarily stored in the same memory as the data; stored programs were not new, as they were common in mechanical or electromechanical computers).
However the Eckert group was secretive, because they hoped to start after the war their own company to make computers and become rich, so it is not known for sure how much von Neumann learned from them and how much of what von Neumann wrote were his own ideas.
In any case, I am more grateful to von Neumann than to the Eckert group, because all the other more important computer projects have started from the von Neumann report, while the work of Eckert and al. had quite a little influence.
The ENIAC computer was very important only as a demonstration that it is possible to make very fast electronic computers, otherwise it had much less influence on the structure of computers than the many other slower computers made around that time.
I have not seen any document from them that could establish credibly how much von Neumann learned from them and how much they have learned from von Neumann.
At least in other cases where some people had secret knowledge that became public only much later, e.g. in the case of the public-key cryptography discovered by the British before Diffie-Hellman-Merkle, they could show some classified reports containing the secret knowledge.
The Eckert group has not shown any previous documents containing the ideas from the von Neumann report, but they just claimed that most ideas have already been communicated during the previous discussions of the group.
That might be true, or not, but it does not matter much.
Only the publication of the von Neumann report was really important, regardless who was the source for the ideas contained in it.
There were a lot of publications; the first one in September 1945 (three month after Goldstein disclosed the Neuman paper) named "Automatic High Speed Computing, A Progress Report on the EDVAC" (see https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10272462...), which was also prior to the patent and yet another reason for its invalidity.
> I have not seen any document from them that could establish credibly how much von Neumann learned from them and how much they have learned from von Neumann.
Having a look at the timeline Neumann was not aware of the project before the ENIAC design was completed.
In all documentaries on the origins of computers that I've watched, von Neumann gets all of the recognition while many of us have heard about Eckert and Mauchly from a Wikipedia article or comment deep down a relevant article.
It is a point of discredit to von Neumann that he did not disavow the naming of the architecture.
Funnily, Goldstine's wife was one of the early programmers and well respected in that area. Goldstine himself made no significant contributions to computing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2jiQXI6nrE
He was a myth even in his own lifetime but parts of that film hint at the man. It features interviews with many of his old colleagues, discussion of what it was like to work with him, etc.
If you just watch one bit, personally I love the anecdote that begins around here:
https://youtu.be/Y2jiQXI6nrE?t=2604
It is a story of his incredible facility for mental arithmetic that I hadn't heard before. It is arguably one of his least impressive skills but for me it illustrates so clearly the gap between him and his peers.
When Shannon first derived his famous formula for information, he asked von Neumann what he should call it and von Neumann replied “You should call it entropy for two reasons: first because that is what the formula is in statistical mechanises but second and more important, as nobody knows what entropy is, whenever you use the term you will always be at an advantage!
http://www.spatialcomplexity.info/what-von-neumann-said-to-s...
Every time I read about the 20th century history of computing, it sounds like it was a wild time. Every advance or discovery seems to have some humorous anecdote attached to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Loved_Only_Numbers
The quote also has truth in it. I had no problem accepting that 0! = 1 only because I learnt that fact early in school. However, I struggled quite a bit to accept that span({}) = {0}, even though it is not that different from 0!=1 and I knew multiple explanations. It seems the later one learns a new concept, the longer it takes to accept it.
It almost irritates me when I read a book or a paper and they say that the zero/empty case is "by convention". I almost want to yell, "no! it's because that's how you make the definition uniform!"
Addition is usually defined as a binary operation, a+b, but really it should be defined as an n-ary operation; associativity tells us that doing "two layers" of addition should boil down to doing a single layer of addition on the concatenated list of operands. That forces 0-ary addition to be zero, which can always be added to the list of operands without affecting the result.
Something similar happens with empty products (which explains the factorial), empty spans, etc. In all cases, the trick is to figure out, what is the equivalent of associativity? What "syntactic" operations on the inputs (for example, concatenating a list of lists of operands) correspond to operations on the outputs (you can get the total sum by first computing partial sums)?
A fun puzzle, if you enjoy this kind of thing: what's the determinant of the 0x0 matrix (over your favourite field or ring)? For all (square) sizes, the determinant of the zero matrix is zero, but the determinant of the identity matrix is one, and the 0x0 matrix is kind of both. So which pattern should win? Which one is stronger? I know my own answer ;)
- n-dimensional volume is a function from (some) subsets of space to real numbers
- it should be additive under union
- it should scale by t^n when you scale the space by a factor of t
I think the upshot of the conversation was that 0-dimensional volume of a shape should be its Euler characteristic. In the simple case of a finite set of points, the "volume" would be the number of points.
And by your earlier comment, span({}) consists of a single point, so its volume should be 1. It all works!
1, because 0x0 seems like a more elegant base case for the recursive det formula than 1x1.
Even just one number theory course helped a lot, since it brought that kind of consistency into its own concept, where [this set of rules] forms a ring, and [this set] forms a field, etc.
all([]) == True
any([]) == False
all: no false elements any: not all false elements
Mental models often get spicy with empty/"corner" cases. This isn't quite the same, but a lot of kids struggle with division as sharing rather than division as measuring, which makes division by a number less than 1 conceptually difficult. http://langfordmath.com/ECEMath/Multiplication/DivModels.htm...
And so, begun the array indexing war has.
Not quite in the same weight class as von Neumann, but Matt Parker's "There's a trick for dealing with that in mathematics, called 'not really worrying about it'" when discussing results that don't mesh with our intuitive understanding is another nice one.
4! = 24 ;; 24 / 4 = 6
3! = 6 ;; 6 / 3 = 2
2! = 2 ;; 2 / 2 = 1
1!= 1 ;; 1 / 1 = 1
0! = 1
Feel free to ask me anything you have trouble with. In the reverse direction, double negative is something that I sometimes have to pay attention to, and I don’t know about another language that employs it.
In mathematics, it begs the question of what "understanding" really means. To understand an object doesn't necessarily mean divining an unquestionable structure by chance. What usually happens is that you're investigating some kind of problem (usually with real-world applications, if distant), and then you find you need a certain tool or a certain theory to simplify your problem, make it more tractable or more abstract. For example, you could be studying permutations, and from there the Binomial comes naturally, as well as the factorial function. From this theory, comes several definitions. The definitions are such to further you goal: they are the ones that make your tool easier to use, simpler, more "streamlined", more suitable to approach your application with minimal special cases. This is how something like '0!' is defined, and how most theories are discovered.
The thing about understanding is that it's a bit too much to require to "understand" something (even to yourself).
How can one know when he's reached "understanding"? Being used to it should be good enough for most purposes. If you know the rules, and you know how to apply them, that's mathematics.
Perhaps another direction to understanding is seeing a thing from a variety of lenses (connecting to different fields), expanding your ability to apply a tool, seeing more broadly. That's when you generalize, and you're able to see what your had as a special case (another definition of understanding): from addition to algebra, to rings, to abstract algebra. From numbers to equations to functions, each step perhaps you "understand" the fundamentals better by having a broader perspective on generalization. But of course that's only useful if your generalization is useful at all.
I feel like there's an intuition which comes along with learning things. Or maybe learning is simply developing intuition.
At some point things somehow just make sense in your mind because you've built up an intuition of how it works.
L'algèbre n’est qu’une géométrie écrite, la géométrie n'est qu'une algèbre figurée. — Sophie Germain
"[..] von Neumann both worked alongside and collaborated with some of the foremost figures of twentieth century science. He went to high school with Eugene Wigner, collaborated with Hermann Weyl at ETH, attended lectures by Albert Einstein in Berlin, worked under David Hilbert at Göttingen, with Alan Turing and Oskar Morgenstern in Princeton, with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen and was close with both Richard Feynman and J. Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos."
..makes me do wonder how many of the accomplishments he made were due to his own brilliance, or due to both it and the stimulating environments he kept finding him self in.
For my own parts, I see a big difference in my own output, and the quality of that output, when getting the opportunity to interact with high caliber people (knowledgable, emotionally intelligent, inquisitive and open) on a regular basis.
For example, from this article about his eidetic memory:
"One of his remarkable abilities was his power of absolute recall. As far as I could tell, von Neumann was able on once reading a book or article to quote it back verbatim; moreover, he could do it years later without hesitation. He could also translate it at no diminution in speed from its original language into English. On one occasion I tested his ability by asking him to tell me how A Tale of Two Cities started. Whereupon, without any pause, he immediately began to recite the first chapter and continued until asked to stop after about ten or fifteen minutes."
> “There was a seminar for advanced students in Zürich that I was teaching and von Neumann was in the class. I came to a certain theorem, and I said it is not proved and it may be difficult. von Neumann didn’t say anything but after five minutes he raised his hand. When I called on him he went to the blackboard and proceeded to write down the proof. After that I was afraid of von Neumann” — George Pólya
The nature vs. nurture argument has its merits in general, but sometimes nature just produces a complete freak. Being surrounded by geniuses probably isn't that valuable when you're head and shoulders above even them.
Possibly less of a freak relative to his surroundings, compared to the difference relative to the rest of us:
Here's some argument from both sides of the nature v nurture debate (from https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid... )
The locality here suggests some "nature":
the Manhattan Project was led by a group of Hungarian supergeniuses, all born in Budapest between 1890 and 1920. These included Manhattan Project founder Leo Szilard, H-bomb creator Edward Teller, Nobel-Prize-winning quantum physicist Eugene Wigner, and legendary polymath John von Neumann, namesake of the List Of Things Named After John Von Neumann.
Or, maybe it's not just localized gene pool, but an experience common to all of them? (from same esay)
The coincidences actually pile up beyond this. Von Neumann, Wigner, and possibly Teller all went to the same central Budapest high school at about the same time, leading a friend to joke about the atomic bomb being basically a Hungarian high school science fair project. [...]
In this case, the guy was Laszlo Ratz, legendary Budapest high school math teacher. I didn’t even know people told legends about high school math teachers, but apparently they do, and this guy features in a lot of them. There is apparently a Laszlo Ratz Memorial Congress for high school math teachers each year, and a Laszlo Ratz medal for services to the profession. There are plaques and statues to this guy. It’s pretty impressive.
“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.”
"You know how much faster I am in thinking than you are? That's how much faster von Neumann is compared to me."
every culture makes myths but obsession is where it becomes problematic. we must have idols, so we will make them opportunistically rather than leave them to organic discovery. there's enough randomness and manipulation in the people we remember historically to not put too much faith in the objectiveness of any of these constructions.
that's not to say that no credit is due them, but that it's overwhelmingly likely overstated, per this obsession.
also note that any story title with a name prominently featured is simply going to be subjective (practically by definition).
Maybe these things take time, but it just doesn't seem like there is anything remotely like this going on today, despite far greater access to education and increases in global population.
Is it perhaps that the limelight is less on mathematicians than it was during the early 20th century?
The fact that so many of them specifically grew up in Hungary, went to school in Germany, and came to the United States is interesting to note though!
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xPJKZyPCvap4Fven8/the-atomic...
Would John Nash be famous if it weren’t for his tragic struggles with mental health? Would I know about Feynman if it weren’t for “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman”, his safecracking, and the topless bars? Would Stephen Hawking be a household name if he weren’t disabled?
WW2 gave a fascinating context to many scientific projects and made lives of these scientists more colorful than they would have been otherwise. Ditto for the Cold War.
It’s up for debate if there’s a slowdown in science nowadays. But it’s certain that lives of those who do science are much more boring to the outsiders. Papers, conferences, labs, petty academic squabbles, fights over funding, perhaps some consulting for the government or the private sector. It’s much harder to create a mythology out of that.
When I think of famous 21st century mathematicians I think of Perelman (a recluse who proved a famous conjecture and refused the Fields Medal) or Zhang (worked as an accountant and at a Subway, then as a lecturer at UNH before making a breakthrough on the twin primes conjecture). Ordinary geniuses who went from top graduate programs to top professorships are comparatively anonymous to the general public.
Terry Tao is surely very accomplished, but is he anywhere nearly as famous?
We had a lot of early "heroes" in Artificial Intelligence, but their accomplishments were eclipsed by newer breakthroughs in a short amount of time by equally smart people. Overall, this is great for humanity since we are pushing boundaries much quicker than was possible earlier.
Everything make sense looking backwards. It is quite possible there are people who exist today in various fields (think AI, crypto, space, vehicles) who will go down in history the same way. Kids will look back in 50 years citing their names, just as we cite Dirac, Einstein, Feynman, Heisenberg, etc. To us, these people are just "scientists", and "engineers" who are also alive at the same time we are. The reward is reaped years later.
Quantum Mechanics' reward was computers and health tech for the most part, but most of that truly started popping off long after the Manhattan project celebs died.
I don't think QM has had its payoff yet, but certainly general and special relativity have paid off in things like GPS, and probably more examples that I don't know about.
Also, they may be celebrities to us. But ask the average person who John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Edsger Dijkstra, or Paul Erdős was, and they'll probably have no idea.
It seems to me like the STEM heroes these days are working together on vaccine technologies. If you follow developments in mRNA technology you'll see there's a lot of international cooperation. It seems to me that current collaboration is on an even greater scale than the STEM heroes of the early 20th century, but it probably won't become clear to many until we look on it in retrospect 50 years from now.
Not sure who their successors were. I guess there's Knuth.
I'd like to take the idyllic position of (somewhat irresponsibly) hoping that some level of genius can be fostered and created in anyone from a young age.. But when I read articles like this I feel the compulsive need to sit back in my chair and ponder just how much more primitive my mind is in comparison to a man like John's.
"Teller also said "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'd like to take the idyllic position of (somewhat irresponsibly) hoping that some level of genius can be fostered and created in anyone from a young age
So you believe that genius is environmental and not genetic? Or maybe we are thinking about different definitions of genius.
I am not a genius, but I can tell that I'm likely above average. I was raised in an environment that did not value intellect or education, and I always felt out of place. It definitely felt innate, and there are lots of stories from people in similar circumstances.
On the other hand, I never did well in school, especially math. One of my teachers literally called me stupid. So I had this self-perception of just not being very good at STEM. Had I not fallen into programming by accident, I would never have changed that perception of myself. I imagine there are very many people who had similar experiences, but were not so lucky as to learn their actual potential.
So, it's almost certainly a combination of factors.
I think it is the same with people holding world records in sports. You can get insanely good no matter where you come from (let alone some unfortunate medical conditions) with only drive and enough exercise, but to win a gold medal, you have to be born for a given sport (of course on top of the insane amount of motivation and exercise spent on it!). Also, probably it is less sport-specific, so someone becoming a world-class soccer player would have been similarly good in a similar sport.
It's also not that useful to think about. Phenylketonuria is a condition that makes you less intelligent if you drink Diet Coke, and most people don't have the gene for it. But not having phenylketonuria isn't a "gene for intelligence", it's just not having a disease.
Humans do have massive genetic diversity, in physical characteristics as well as mental ones). In the last decade, GWAS analysis has now lead to the ability to identify the gene combinations responsible for intelligence (as well as height, various cancer predispositions etc), and predictive ability is high (i.e. predicting cohort differences in income, years of education etc just from genetic material).
It is also something both extremely useful and important to think about both how to avoid both nature and nurture components of intelligence. Preventing diseases detrimental to brain development (like using unleaded fuel and paints) are some of the best bang for the buck on a population level, and maximizing the genetic potential of your offspring by avoiding genetic faults and choosing positive traits while doing IVF will be an unavoidable consequence of current research.
That you seem to think GWAS operates at a genetic level, just for a start, leads me to doubt very strongly you will be able to provide any supporting citations for the claims you make here, which are wildly heterodox verging upon eugenicist.
I am no longer close to the field of bioinformatics, though, so perhaps you will surprise me!
There is of course some genetic components in potential abilities.
But I strongly believe that most of the differences we are seeing are built on compounded interest of environmental factors, starting from a very young age.
Being "99.9 percent identical" doesn't necessarily preclude substantial genetic variation in intelligence just like it doesn't preclude such variation in height or skin tone.
I was asking what the basis is for your confidence that it positively isn't substantially genetic.
We know that intelligence is highly heritable, which leaves a few possible explanations, genetics being one of them (along with prenatal nutrition, prenatal lead exposure, etc).
If you're going to claim that genetics is only a small part of the reason that it's heritable, then that has its own burden of proof that needs to be met.
It seems like minor genetic differences can create large disparities.
I definitely think environmental factors can compound on a genetic baseline though, and of course the earlier you start compounding the greater the returns.
I don't think the GP is arguing one way or the other. They seem to be mostly questioning how wide the error bars should be on these statements. It looks like a Socratic twist on "citation needed" without an implication that statements are necessarily wrong.
I don't think it was a biological separation. Neumann, and his brilliant peers, all grew up in Hungary in the midst of political and ethnic oppression with significant economic and language barriers to overcome. Books have been written about it, and I can't accurately recount the facts. But it seems to me that what separates him and his peers is their perseverance in the face of adversity. Having overcome the very difficult circumstances in which they were born prepared them for great success later in life. It's inspiring, but in some ways it's also survivorship bias, since there were uncountable people who were born in the same circumstances and did not overcome. I think similar things are happening with refugees today. Those who overcome their circumstances often go on to be outstanding examples of genius and accomplishment in their fields.
The situation obviously rapidly changed in Europe, but Von Neumann left for Princeton before the 30s began. He grew up in a life of great privilege.
— John von Neumann
Eg. your atom/molecule example, it may only be more orderly to a human brain, when in actuality the added entropy of the tight packing is overcome by the favorable energy state at the temperatures we are used to. So there may be a difference in a fixed order by energy expenditure like a cell (Neumann’s point) and seemingly ordered state that in physical actuality requires no additional energy like a salt crystal (your point). With this (maybe faulty) distinction, Neumann’s point still stands in my reading.
If we were to have an immortal supercell that didn’t reproduce, it would likely seize to exist at an “infinite” timeline due to some rare external event, even if it is superior in every way to a simple cell that only reproduces. While at the other hand a “single” crystal will similarly not survive a long timeline, but by simply its structure being a law of nature, it will form again in the same way.
This is the line of arguments in favor of the "simulation theory": "If in a distance future a civilization ever manages to create a simulation, who says we are not already into one of them?"
Maybe it's still happening but we no longer hear the names, though potentially it was also just one of those alignments of possibilities.
Also, I think there are much more polymaths during our time than 1900s, thanks to the internet. A single person can consume much more information than before. This will make it difficult to make a single person get all the spotlight. I believe we have a lot of geniuses in the back stage that the public simply don’t know exist.
While it's no doubt from accounts Nuemann was brilliant, I've observed other brilliant people who I feel could be ground breaking minds given the right set of circumstances.
A bit of nature vs nurture, environment vs natural talent. I feel as though humanity often has the Neumann, Einstein, Euler, Ramanujan, etc. but need the right set of circumstances to really shine through. They could just be outliers but when you see a collection of these sort of minds during a time period, I can't help but think there is an environmental factor enabling it. Even people as brilliant as Newton had some equivilance in Leibnez with the invention of calculus (Newton was clearly above and beyond though).
Necessity is the mother of invention. But abstract thought requires time to focus on things outside the mundane.
We do hear the names, it's just difficult to recognise which ones are going to be the names that echo for generations.
I would be completely unsurprised if articles like this were written about Tao in 50 years' time.
Luckily the war didnt happen, but it was a reasonable possibility. So only in hindsight do these beliefs look stupid (and evil).
Von Neumann also influenced the Goverment on Military Strategy and basically invented MAD. Which worked great so far.
Considering the oppression that his native country experienced at the hands of the USSR, and the fact that the implications of nuking an entire country weren't really understood yet at that point, this view is hardly surprising.
Consider that Bertrand Russell - the well-known and self-described pacifist - shared that view as well.
To greatly simplify the concept: if you believed that total war between the USSR and the West was inevitable, attacking first while the US was the only nuclear power would substantially limit casualties and ensure that the West won.
Does another such assembly exist today? I don't think it does but want to know if others can point to one.
Did it happen then because the discoveries were "low hanging" enough that they would be found eventually, such that today we've basically exhausted the major discoverable parts of nature given human limitations, like a depleting orebody where what's left are marginally economic residuals? Or was there something in particular about Western societies a century or two ago that produced such brilliance (or even specifically the Habsburgs's HRE where von Neumann was from), which perhaps we can learn from to steer things today?
"The Duties of John von Neumann’s Assistant"
https://www.cantorsparadise.com/the-duties-of-john-von-neuma...
I don’t think there’s any reason to think people like Gauss and von Neumann are much smarter than a modern day equivalent, say Terrence Tao. But Tao’s work, despite being across many fields, is very specialized and not as well publicized.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xPJKZyPCvap4Fven8/the-atomic...
The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21542753 - Nov 2019 (319 comments)
- Enrico Fermi
As an aside, are there many pure research institutes left? It seems like academic life is now mostly spent chasing grants and managing teaching load, and very very few people get to do pure research.
[1] http://www.uvm.edu/pdodds/files/papers/others/2009/dyson2009...
“Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs“ — John Backus, in ACM 1978.
I'm also interested because, as my username implies, I'm learning web dev and I would like to ensure if possible that any websites I make don't have this issue for people wanting to print pages from them.
It reminds me of my teenage years when I was a young student of mathematics and voraciously devoured the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive: https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/
Thank you, Jorgen Veisdal.
My only appeal to you is that you not put these articles behind the Medium paywall. But if you are earning significant income via Medium, I retract my appeal.
I've been listening to his podcast, it has a lot of great Q&A!
Then there would have been many more theorems bearing his name:
Not to say that von Neumann lived a happy life — he sounds like a bit of an asshole — but I wonder whether Gödel would have traded his achievements for less isolation and a less tortured existence?
Feynman would be another example like Von Neumann. Off-the-charts intelligence and admired for his intelligence, his honesty and sense of adventure. But limited creative output due apparently to his pursuit of sex and intrigue.
“von Neumann (1926). His third paper Az általános nalmazelmélet axiomatikus folépitése, his doctoral dissertation”
It should be halmazelmélet and fölépítése/felépítése
Our progress will start increasing even more.
Imagine what our world would look like if the average person lived to over 90 and was still mentally sharp.
Imagine an additional 40 years of Neumann, 20 years of Einstein, even from the more modern times also, Steve Jobs or my personal favorite Paul Allen.
Paul Allen is one of my personal heroes, and I cannot help but drop a tear whenever I think of how the techonology world would look like if Paul Allen didn't get cancer and had to retire from Microsoft before the age of 40..
If anyone is interested, I implore you to read Paul Allen's autobiography, The Idea Man. One of the best books I have ever read, you are amazed at what kind of man Paul Allen was.
One of my favorite stories is when Allen and Gates made their first BASIC and had to go pitch it to Albuquerque to get their first customer. Gates did not dare leave Harvard yet, so they sent Allen alone to go deal with it, and while Allen was on the plane, he realized that while they had developed the BASIC, they didn't make the bootstrap loader. So Allen minutes before landing, grabbed a steno pad and started writing the code in machine language, all from the head...
And it worked... I mean what can say to that, except feel insignificant?
Might he be the inventor of OO programming ?? :)
So, nothing to do with OOP.
Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.I'm always super-suspicious when I hear someone's brilliance described in anecdotes. Some people are better at promoting themselves than others. So perhaps judge him only by his published work and not his reputation.
I really hate Medium so much.
Why are you bringing up RMS?
The social norms were different back then. And even then von Neumann is not known as someone who harmed women (or men).
Those women might have equally looked at men. It’s getting ridiculous.