Von Neumann, Einstein, Morgenstern, Morse and Lefschetz (1952)
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The gist of what he said was that while he admired von Neumann greatly, particularly for his incredible speed and clarity of understanding, sometimes he felt a greater respect and closeness for Lefschetz, who lost both of his hands in an industrial accident and despite saying that Lefschetz's style of thinking was 'incredibly confused' in the sense he [Lefschetz] didn't have a full understanding of what he himself [Lefschetz] was thinking, he wanted to get to know him more. More evidence comes from a quote of J. Barkley Rosser which goes as follows [1]:
"If Church said it's obvious, then everybody saw it a half hour ago. If Weyl says it's obvious, von Neumann can prove it. If Lefschetz says it's obvious, it's false."
He also notes unlike Lefschetz von Neumann was not considered by some mathematicians to be a great mathematician because there wasn't one big thing or field that he became the best in the world at or contributed the most too, noting that in mathematics he would likely be best remembered for his work in rings of operators (now known as von Neumann algebras). This lines up with several other stories I've read in math history where many considered much of von Neumann's work past the 1940s (where he was working primarily in applied mathematics and other applied fields) a waste of his talent.
- Adventures of a Mathematician (Ulam)
- What Little I Remember (Frisch)
- Memoirs of a Physicist in the Atomic Age (Elasser)
- The Traveller (Yukawa)
- Discovery of Anti-Matter (Carl Anderson)
Also Freeman Dyson's and Feynman's stuff. I'm ever open to recommendations from readers who enjoy the same stuff.
I recently read
- The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom
- The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (Paul Erdős)
The Dirac book is by a physicist, as opposed to a professional biographer. I very much enjoyed it. Dirac crossed paths and interacted with all of the great quantum physicists in the 20th century. He and his work never captured the public imagination in the same way Einstein did, nor did his personality and propensity for teaching resonate like Feynman or Sagan. (Feynman was, of course, an exceedingly brilliant physicist, but I think he was known more by the public for his personality than his QED). But he had a lot of ideas that were ahead of his time, and he was driven by the notion of mathematical beauty. Hell, the Dirac equation was a work of inspired genius that seemed to come from the annals of his mind alone.
Similar to Einstein, his work got away from him, and later in life he was resistant to the beast he helped create (quantum field theory).
Erdős was a prolific, unparalleled genius in number theory, as well as a wandering academic. He was quite inept at self-care, and found shelter based on the hospitality of his friends and colleagues. He never held a permanent position, spending his time trotting the globe to collaborate with interesting folks. I came away from the book feeling quite melancholy about the man and his life. But he seemed to have followed his passion in a way few do. On the other hand, he would likely pity me, the mathematician-turned-physicist-turned-industrial-researcher.
- American Prometheus - About J. Robert Oppenheimer's life. Lots of stories of lots of scientists and politicians, bureaucrats, etc throughout his life.
- Benjamin Franklin's autobiography - Wasn't a great book, but towards the end made mention that he wanted to meet Issac Newton when he went to England on some government business. Until reading it, I hadn't realized they were contemporaries.
- Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson - Lots of stories with people well known inside the technology industry.
A really beautiful book with lots of photographies of all members of the Vienna circle and what happened to them. Some parts, of course, are also about Gödel.
https://youtu.be/1Rr3ZWt1ULQ (the whole interview is very interesting and contains a lot of stories of meeting other physicists and mathematicians, it’s broken up into a series of snippets of a few minutes each on youtube)
In the end this trip lead to one of Dyson’s biggest contributions to physics, he could talk to Feynman about his research on the road trip and visited Schwinger afterwards and as such was in a unique position to recognise and formalise the equivalence of Feynman’s, Schwinger’s and Tomanaga's formulations of quantum electrodynamics. This was an important step towards the acceptance of Feynman diagrams.
I also really liked "Maker of Patterns”, Dyson’s autobiography through letters.
Its fine as a filter I can privately turn on to delude myself. But when the pictures spread it reinforced our modern biases in the past
Solely going by the timeline described in [0] it's rather unlikely that these are denim.