When you look at it holistically, von Neumann was more influential in science and mathematics in the 20th century than either Einstein or Planck. He wasn't as obvious a symbol of the scientific revolution, but his contributions to SO MANY THINGS at a fundamental level makes him stand out to me.
It's odd that even today, different disciplines are still silo'd. My son started a research cross-database search engine because different disciplies use different terms for nearly identical concepts. Even within medicine it's silo'd.
Trouble with that startup was, the medical folks with money don't use computer tools. And the students in training have no money.
It's crazy that we talk about LLMs, AI/ML and what not but so many fields still don't use computation as much as we think they do simply because they cannot reliably keep up with the advancements happening almost everyday and people simply forgetting about backwards compatibility in their products
Definitely my favorite physicist for the same reason you state. The notion that he just went around different fields and said “here’s how math can improve things,” invented some new approach, and moved on to another field to do it all over again just cracks me up.
The end of life section is a bit whitewashed. Freeman Dyson had an article (struggling to find it) about how von Neumann was invited to give a Hilbert-style lecture on the 10 problems for the new computing age. All the big names at the time were there, but von Neumann was in such poor shape (dementia I assume), that it was decided to pretend it had never happened.
For a longer read, I can highly recommend the book "The Man from the Future" by Ananyo Bhattacharya. It's quite an easy read and extensively discusses the life and discoveries by John von Neumann in chronological order.
I had to frequently pause my read to research a discovery in more depth to understand the significance of it and I got a chuckle when he marries his childhood sweetheart because she got no mention prior to that point in the book.
He's my favourite mathematician too. Loved The Man from the Future book. Can we get a frontier model named after him perhaps? "Johnny" would be a great codename imo
Not sure what just happened but like 10 comments just vanished. Anyway, here's a wiki link to "The Martians" which was a group of Hungarian scientists and Von Neuman was a member.
"The Martians" (Hungarian: "A marslakók") were a group of prominent scientists (mostly, but not exclusively, physicists and mathematicians) of Hungarian Jewish descent who emigrated from Europe to the United States in the early half of the 20th century.[1]
Leo Szilard jokingly suggested that Hungary was a front for aliens from Mars."
You might not have "show dead" enabled in your settings. There is an antisemitic comment that was flagged and is now "dead" with a bunch of replies - so you would have seen those, and then now not see them if you don't have "show dead" enabled.
This seems relevant to the current debate on the role of AI in mathematics:
What made von Neumann great? Was it the extraordinary rapidity with which
he could understand and think and the unusual memory that retained everything
he had once thought through? No. These qualities, however impressive they might
have been, are ephemeral; they will have no more effect on the mathematics and the
mathematicians of the future than the prowess of an athlete of a hundred years ago
has on the sport of today.
I liked the book, it uses an interesting storytelling mechanism of telling each chapter through the lens of a different historical character (his mom, his wife, friends, etc). But I think Labatut sacrificed voice and tone a little bit (there weren’t too many elements to differentiate between each narrator).
I remember reading about how he was also a pioneer in using early supercomputers to predict weather patterns in meteorology. I never thought to combine supercomputers and weather before.
Authored by Paul Halmos. He wrote Finite-Dimensional Vector Spaces, which was assigned textbook for my Linear Algebra course. A humbling read for me, coming from calc 3 and thinking I was hot shit. Stripped me of any illusions of becoming a mathematician.
OT: I found this style of writing extremely clear and readable. I wonder what is different about this author’s writing. There is zero pretension and just exists to impart information. But if that’s the case why do I hate the writing in Wikipedia?
The Martians (of which von Neumann is usually the most regarded) were mostly Hungarian jews. It's a point on which some people have mused, so it's easy for the thought to point in that direction when von Neumann is brought up.
Trouble with that startup was, the medical folks with money don't use computer tools. And the students in training have no money.
edit: article is called Birds and Frogs, by Freeman Dyson https://wucj.lab.westlake.edu.cn/Others/Dyson_Birds_and_Frog...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)
"The Martians" (Hungarian: "A marslakók") were a group of prominent scientists (mostly, but not exclusively, physicists and mathematicians) of Hungarian Jewish descent who emigrated from Europe to the United States in the early half of the 20th century.[1]
Leo Szilard jokingly suggested that Hungary was a front for aliens from Mars."
What made von Neumann great? Was it the extraordinary rapidity with which he could understand and think and the unusual memory that retained everything he had once thought through? No. These qualities, however impressive they might have been, are ephemeral; they will have no more effect on the mathematics and the mathematicians of the future than the prowess of an athlete of a hundred years ago has on the sport of today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_MANIAC
The Martians (of which von Neumann is usually the most regarded) were mostly Hungarian jews. It's a point on which some people have mused, so it's easy for the thought to point in that direction when von Neumann is brought up.
I had a girlfriend once who joked that Elon Musk was an alien and needs help developing the technology to get home.
Please do NOT disrespect Leo Szilard and von Neumann by comparing their greatness to a lowly scammer
In other words, if you don't have a dog, you're gay. (If you know the comic)
I'm rawdogging wgsl In a bytecode VM
One type bruv:
alias Value = mat4x4<f32>; alias Buffer = array<Value, 256>; // // mental bruv