knbknb t1_ixjb425 wrote
I remember that a philosophy professor called John von Neumann the smartest person who has ever lived. Do you think so too?
When was the decade when JvN was most productive?
Someone said that JvN grew up in Hungary in a trilingual household, learning Hungarian, Hebrew and German- from a very young age on . These languages are different as it gets. Do you think this would be a reinforcing factor boosting his intelligence?
Which areas of science that he invented (or was productive in) did you study so far? Which ones did you have to omit because the field is so different?
simplicissimusrex OP t1_ixjicoy wrote
I remember that a philosophy professor called John von Neumann the smartest person who has ever lived. Do you think so too?
Yes! Though it depends a bit on what you he meant by 'smart'. In terms of the sheer firepower of his brain, I don't think we know of anyone who was a faster mathematical thinker than von Neumann. His friend, Wigner, claimed that while JVN had the most exceptional brain among any of the incredible geniuses they both knew, Einstein was the the deeper thinker. People thought von Neumann was less of a creative thinker--he tended to bulldoze his way through problems. But I think that was a little unfair on him. I think it's only really now, more than half a century on, we're really beginning to appreciate how prescient his contributions really were.
I focused on his contributions to mathematical logic and the foundational crisis in maths (because that ends up being key to his thinking later), then the science, engineering and maths that is most relevant to us today. So there's a huge swathe of his mathematical contributions I almost completely ignore. There's a whole branch of algebra (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_algebra) he invented that gets a cursory mention in the book. But Vaughan Jones won the Fields Medal as a result of exploring just a small part of it!
simplicissimusrex OP t1_ixm8fbi wrote
>When was the decade when JvN was most productive?
This one's really difficult. Unlike Einstein, von Neumann remained productive throughout his whole life--even writing an influential lecture series on his deathbed! But the 1930s were incredible. During that decade, he published his book establishing the rigorous mathematical foundations of quantum mechanis (still definitive), explored the non-linear dynamics of explosions (which would later lead him to his decisive contribution to the Manhattan Project), proved his version of the ergodic theorem, began exploring rings of operators (now known as von Neumann algebras) with 3 monumental papers... (he also bribed a driving test examiner in Princeton to get a license)
His rings of operators are probably his most profound contribution to pure maths. As Freeman Dyson wrote: ‘Exploring the ocean of rings of operators, he found new continents that he had no time to survey in detail. He intended one day to publish a grand synthesis of his work on rings of operators. The grand synthesis remains an unwritten masterpiece, like
the eighth symphony of Sibelius.’
Still von Neumann managed to write 7 papers totalling 500 pages on them! The mathematician Vaughan Jones was awarded the Fields Medal for his work on the mathematics of knots, which emerged from his study of Type II von Neumann algebras. And Carlo Rovelli and Alain Connes used Type III factors in their effort to solve the ‘problem of time’: that though we feel time to flow ‘forwards’, there is no single
unified explanation for why this is so (quantum theory and general relativity, for example, have radically different concepts of time).
But I'd have to choose the 40s for their incredible impact: the von Neumann architecture, the conversion of the ENIAC into the first modern stored program computer, the work on the Manhattan project, his work to aid the US and the secret mission to help the British Navy, the first ever computer simulations, Monte Carlo method with Ulam, the first modern computer program with his wife Klara Dan, the IAS computer project--which with its widely circulated progress reports spawned the first generation of modern computers including IBM's first commercial computer, and, as a hobby, he invented modern game theory with Morgenstern.
Incidentally, for more on Klara Dan von Neumann, might I humbly recommend:
and
Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments