simplicissimusrex OP t1_ixm8fbi wrote
Reply to comment by knbknb in I'm Ananyo Bhattacharya, author of 'The Man from the Future', about Hungarian-American mathematical genius John von Neumann. AMA! by simplicissimusrex
>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
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