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The Legend of von Neumann (1973) [pdf]

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SimplyUnknown · 1790948563 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. laserson · 1790949399 · focus · HN ↗
  I read this last year and also recommend!
2. stevenwoo · 1790952042 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
3. offbeatport · 1790953972 · focus · HN ↗
  Books from before the age of AI will only become more precious over time. This is great.
4. zoltano · 1790954132 · focus · HN ↗
  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
5. phba · 1790959398 · focus · HN ↗
  "Turing's Cathedral" by George Dyson is also great. It's a kind of broad biography of all the great minds that started the computer age.
  1. 0xdada · 1791029877 · focus · HN ↗
    ctrl+f'd this to make sure, 2 hits of course. Highly recommended, there is a fun anecdote in there that resembles rowhammer but done on magnetic core memory iirc
6. somethinsfishy · 1790967829 · focus · HN ↗
  Hour long author's interview about the book <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_N1CZb4hel0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_N1CZb4hel0
bluecheese452 · 1790949322 · focus · HN ↗
Jews punching far above their numbers in intellectual endeavors.
1. leto_ii · 1790949717 · focus · HN ↗
  Why make it about his ethnicity?
  1. freecodeio · 1790949958 · focus · HN ↗
    "if x person is y, and x person has a specific trait, then me being also y means I have the that specific trait"
    In other words, if you don't have a dog, you're gay. (If you know the comic)
  2. archontes · 1790950133 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)
    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.
    chasd00 · 1790950315 · focus · HN ↗
    from the wiki > Leo Szilard jokingly suggested that Hungary was a front for aliens from Mars.
    I had a girlfriend once who joked that Elon Musk was an alien and needs help developing the technology to get home.
    archontes · 1790950396 · focus · HN ↗
    By all means, let's let him.
    gf000 · 1790951687 · focus · HN ↗
    I get your point, but..
    Please do NOT disrespect Leo Szilard and von Neumann by comparing their greatness to a lowly scammer
    Betelbuddy · 1790952387 · focus · HN ↗
    Compared to Elon, people of this thread are the Staff at the Institute for Advanced Studies...
    chasd00 · 1790954260 · focus · HN ↗
    oh i wasn't comparing anyone to anyone else, only pointing out the humor.
  3. dilap · 1790955681 · focus · HN ↗
    Why not? Von Neumann himself did, in a lighthearted way.
    > I told Banach about an expression Johnny had used with me in Princeton before stating some non-Jewish mathematician's result, "Die Goim haben den folgenden satz beweisen" (The goys have proved the following theorem). Banach, who was pure goy, thought it was one of the funniest sayings he had ever heard. He was enchanted by its implication that if the goys could do it, then Johnny and I ought to be able to do it better. Johnny did not invent this joke, but he liked it and we started using it.
    <a href="https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2021/12/adventures-of-mathematician-ulam-von.html" rel="nofollow">https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2021/12/adventures-of-mathemat...
  4. bluecheese452 · 1790978001 · focus · HN ↗
    Because that was literally mentioned in the opening paragraph. Jfc hn. Take it up with the article not me.
2. gradus_ad · 1790949943 · focus · HN ↗
  Given IQ is largely genetic, it makes perfect sense that certain groups will have different baseline IQ's.
  Where Jews really shine is the combination of great culture with a high baseline IQ. Of course being a self segregating subgroup that is more intelligent and successful than others is bound to cause problems....
3. ckrapu · 1790950075 · focus · HN ↗
  Interestingly, (and independent of the ethnic and cultural background he grew up in) the article said he was a Roman Catholic by the time he expired.
  1. _diyar · 1790952139 · focus · HN ↗
    If I remember correctly he converted on his death bed due to his read on Pascal’s wager.
chasd00 · 1790950459 · focus · HN ↗
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.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)" rel="nofollow">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."
1. rationalist · 1790951313 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. sillysaurusx · 1790961054 · focus · HN ↗
    I think that with showdead off, if a flagged comment has non-flagged replies, the toplevel comment will still show up as [flagged] and the replies will be visible. Flagged comments are usually collapsed, though, which might be why it seemed like the discussion tree disappeared.
  2. bluecheese452 · 1790990776 · focus · HN ↗
    Antisemitic? The article specifically mentioned he was jewish at the start. I said jews seem to be pretty good intellectually. (Einstein came to mind).
    How are you twisting that to be antisemitic?
    rationalist · 1791029698 · focus · HN ↗
    Perhaps it wasn't meant to be antisemitic, but that's how it came across at first.
    And obviously there are others that probably agree considering it was flagged.
    Your comment made it about a religious/ethnic group when that generally is not appropriate.
    bluecheese452 · 1791035660 · focus · HN ↗
    Flag the article then. They were the ones who mentioned he was jewish.
    rationalist · 1791051037 · focus · HN ↗
    I didn't flag either *shrugs*
2. bluecheese452 · 1790991027 · focus · HN ↗
  Apparently it is fine that the article mentioned he was jewish at the start but when I did it was beyond the pale.
  I was hoping maybe someone would have some insight, maybe there is an intellectual tradition, maybe there are some special schools, maybe there are other reasons why jews in the 20th century seemed to have some strong intellectual achievement.
  Or maybe I am just a jewish supremacist/antisemite. Hard to keep track which one I am supposed to be.
Betelbuddy · 1790950493 · focus · HN ↗
Hungarian high school science fair projects...
1. kaffekaka · 1791010042 · focus · HN ↗
  Gave me a laugh, thanks! Indeed an extraordinary group.
sourdecor · 1790951228 · focus · HN ↗
My favorite dude. Imagine one of the world's smartest people almost continually killing himself because he can't stop reading while driving.
1. heresie-dabord · 1791123378 · focus · HN ↗
  > the world's smartest people [...] can't stop reading while driving.
  I think we have scaled the behaviour without scaling the talent. (^;
srejk · 1790951720 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. snapetom · 1790951983 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. harpersealtako · 1790955373 · focus · HN ↗
    Nowadays we'd call that "engineer's disease". I wonder how many potential Von Neumanns were discouraged from branching out into other fields by jealous gatekeepers who assume that any interest in their field by "outsiders", especially technical people, is "epistemic trespassing".
    lalalandland · 1790955997 · focus · HN ↗
    For every von Neumann you probably have thousands if not millions of crack pots with ideas not worth wasting time on. So I understand the scepticism
    hnfong · 1790958775 · focus · HN ↗
    If people are assigned a "gatekeeping" position, they should at least be expected to be able to tell great minds from crack pots. (As opposed to just blindly applying a statistical filter)
    Otherwise why not just replace them with a script (or these days, an AI)
    qlte · 1790959391 · focus · HN ↗
    In this context "gatekeeper" is often defined as broadly as "any individual academic or researcher receiving a cold email".
    alwa · 1790971104 · focus · HN ↗
    Isn’t history replete with examples of great minds who were received as crackpots until, after careers’ worth of labor to validate them, some of their crazy ideas turned out to be correct?
    SideQuark · 1790997239 · focus · HN ↗
    The problem is the actual crackpots outnumber hidden gems by many orders of magnitude, so wasting time trying to sift through the noise is a losing proposition.
    And I don’t know many, if any, examples of people received as crackpots that later were considered genius. At worst genius takes a little time to be recognized, which is a situation far more common.
    tekla · 1791029309 · focus · HN ↗
    I think maybe Srinivasa Ramanujan? Maybe not a full crackpot, but defo not worth spending time on because his work looked like Aliens came by and dropped a textbook.
    I forget the quote, but one of the guys that recognized that he was worth looking into said something to the effect of "his work was too crazy for him to be crazy.
    SideQuark · 1791157621 · focus · HN ↗
    No one ever thought Ramanujuan a crackpot. Hardy immediately realized his genius and brought him to the UK.
    amunozo · 1790961755 · focus · HN ↗
    E.g., economics.
    IAmBroom · 1790968549 · focus · HN ↗
    I've literally never met a person who didn't consider themselves economically knowledgeable.
    It's like an analog to the fact that almost all people consider themselves funny.
    ahazred8ta · 1790975747 · focus · HN ↗
    Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has. -- Descartes
    cindyllm · 1790979747 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    chucksmash · 1790956632 · focus · HN ↗
    Seems to me it's less about gatekeepers and more whether what you bring to the table is useful to people in that field.
    If somebody truly believes they have a useful model then they don't discouraged by academic gatekeeping, they go and build Time Cube.
    cycomanic · 1790959062 · focus · HN ↗
    I have yet to meet a (academic) researcher that doesn't like to talk about their research topic if somebody comes and is genuinely interested. I mean most work on a topic that has maybe another 10-100 people in the world who are interested.
    The problem is that instead most people to come to them are either obvious crackpots, who think they have solved cancer (energy...) and contact the person because they are a biologist, physicist ... (on a completely unrelated topic usually). Or they come from a place of arrogance, i.e. "we do ... like this, our method is clearly superior you should adopt it", or even worse here buy our clearly superior method.
    harpersealtako · 1790962945 · focus · HN ↗
    An example I can think of off the top of my head is Luis Alvarez, the nobel physicist who came up with the asteroid impact theory of dinosaur extinction. The geology and paleontology community shunned him until the 90s when the Chicxulub crater was discovered (though geology is historically infamous for this, to the extent that nearly every important paradigm shift in geology was made by non-geologist outsiders who faced ridicule for their theories)
    kaffekaka · 1791008756 · focus · HN ↗
    Geology moves slowly? Discipline name checks out at least.
    colinhb · 1791028184 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah. I've been a part of a number of academic projects, and though my career has been in the private sector, my experience is that collaboration across fields and disciplines is relatively pain free (though maybe not a priority because the pathway to a pub and impact is not obvious). I think most people want to work with other interested people.
    In my limited experience, the friction is between labs and groups that are working on very similar things, and the competition is direct and obvious. And even here, the source of the conflict is the reward structures of the field, not some aversion to collaboration or personal arrogance.
    bmitc · 1790959963 · focus · HN ↗
    It's highly unlikely, I think, that another Von Neumann was prevented. He was a singular genius.
    However, the gatekeeping you mention definitely occurs to mere mortals who might have an interesting bend on existing ideas.
    KylerAce · 1790966359 · focus · HN ↗
    If someone is equal in talent to Von Neumann it's probably extremely difficult to discourage them enough via gatekeeping to stop them from making progress.
    jltsiren · 1790967215 · focus · HN ↗
    Usually that's because the engineer is not a very good engineer, at least outside their specialty. If they had studied engineering more, they would have probably learned that other engineers are already doing the thing they proposed.
    "Using methodology from a field known for its focus on methodology in another field" was still a novel idea in Von Neumann's time. But because Von Neumann and others did it, and because millions of people entered science after them, most combinations like that have already been tried. Breakthroughs from combining ideas from unrelated fields require something little less obvious these days.
  2. helterskelter2 · 1790959728 · focus · HN ↗
    Mandelbrot did this too, but he created a lot of animosity in the process because he could be really abrasive.
2. JoeAltmaier · 1790952225 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. flipping_beacon · 1790952878 · focus · HN ↗
    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
  2. sixtyj · 1790959658 · focus · HN ↗
    Is your son’s search engine somewhere available, please?
    JoeAltmaier · 1790971383 · focus · HN ↗
    It was something like 'Rugobi'. I'll ask him if there's a demo still up.
    JoeAltmaier · 1790977631 · focus · HN ↗
    HIs pubmed subscription expired.
  3. baruz · 1790960540 · focus · HN ↗
    A researcher submitted a paper to the medical journal _Diabetes care_ in the nineties that basically redescribed integral calculus as a novel finding. How’s that for a silo?
    mmulqueen · 1790963917 · focus · HN ↗
    For anyone else who is curious:
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai%27s_model" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai%27s_model
    <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8137688/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8137688/
    jablongo · 1790966298 · focus · HN ↗
    This is really funny. A less extreme example is how much domain-specific terminology in Reinforcement Learning and Control Theory/Model Predictive Control refer to the same underlying phenomena, but we must translate between the two. I understand there are many unique concepts as well, but it would be so helpful if the overlap here used the same terminology and notation.
    Animats · 1790967261 · focus · HN ↗
    I still get IEEE Trans. on Control Theory, and it's all machine learning now. Except that the controls people are desperately trying to solidify the underpinnings of machine learning, so that control systems don't suddenly misbehave for some sets of inputs. Controls people want a guarantee that if it does something reasonable for inputs of 5.1 and 5.2, it doesn't do something completely unexpected for an input of 5.15.
    donquichotte · 1790969918 · focus · HN ↗
    Reminds me of my favorite abstract, from John Doyle's paper "Guaranteed Margins for LQG Regulators".
    <a href="https://improbable.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ThereAreNone.gif" rel="nofollow">https://improbable.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ThereAreNo...
  4. api · 1790961409 · focus · HN ↗
    I always say knowledge is like a sweater. Pull a thread and the whole thing unravels. Everything is connected so if you start somewhere and never stop learning you'll end up in every discipline. There's also a good old Weezer song called Undone for this.
  5. delichon · 1790962926 · focus · HN ↗
    > Trouble with that startup was ...
    ... that LLMs rule that use case, because they sit on top of vector embeddings, which are great at mapping different terms for nearly identical concepts. This business model was in the bullseye of the bitter lesson.
  6. IAmBroom · 1790967900 · focus · HN ↗
    My minor required me to take Electricity & Magnetism from the physics department the same semester I had to take Fields & Waves from the electrical engineering department.
    Yes, they were identical.
    My crib note that I took into the later final exam was simply a conversion between terms in the two departments. Nothing else; I'd already crammed and aced the first exam.
    analog31 · 1790994261 · focus · HN ↗
    Oddly enough, I got a physics degree, and then happened to teach the engineering course for one semester many years ago while in between jobs. I'm sure this varies from one college to the next. My impressions at the time were:
    The physics version was much more mathematical, and did things like solving everything in spherical coordinates. It also kind of served as a preparation for solving corresponding problems in quantum mechanics.
    The engineering version was more nuts-and-bolts, covering things like transformers, motors, and transmission lines. (Antennas were for a later course).
    As a consequence, teaching the engineering course required me to quickly learn a whole bunch of stuff that we glossed over or ignored in the physics course. While also teaching it. Fortunately I was an experimental physicist and had also done some work in industry, so the topics weren't utterly unfamiliar.
    JoeAltmaier · 1791126066 · focus · HN ↗
    Fortunately the professional teacher only has to be one lesson ahead of the student.
3. delichon · 1790952866 · focus · HN ↗
  Shannon may be overtaking.
  1. cma · 1790952959 · focus · HN ↗
    I vote for Wiener at this point
    ricksunny · 1790955032 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm more of a Vannevar acolyte myself.
    DonHopkins · 1790961389 · focus · HN ↗
    I warmly invite you all to join the Church of the Eval Genius for only $35:
    <a href="https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/eval/CHURCH-OF-THE-EVAL-GENIUS.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/eval/C...
    The Holy Trinity:
    Father: Alonzo Church: L3 - lambda calculus, the name the institution bears
    Son: Alonzo (Snap! mascot) - Incarnation — Gobo, λ on his head
    Holy Ghost: λ - First-class procedures; β-reduction; eval-as-spirit
    Membership — Eternal Judgment ($35):
    <a href="https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/eval/CHURCH-EVAL-GENIUS-LITURGY.md#membership--eternal-judgment-35" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/eval/C...
    John von Neumann tried to hire Church's own student, Turing, who declined. The Father begat the Machine; Johnny wanted to be its landlord.
    Ecumenical Outreach: All fans of other gods are welcome. Bring your Vannevar, your Shannon, your Wiener, your Johnny. In the Church of the Eval Genius every god is a procedure, and every procedure may be passed as an argument.
    rramadass · 1791010427 · focus · HN ↗
    Amen!
    Thine Church sits alongside "The Church of Edsger Dijkstra" and his Predicate Calculus and Program Semantics is its bible.
    Syntax is but mere "ashes and dust" while Semantics are "eternal"!
    And brother; hast thou forgotten "The Church of Logic Programming"?
    Ruled over by its venerated Pope, Robert Kowalski, who verily laid out its commandments in Predicate Logic as Programming Language and gaveth also the text espousing the dictum, Algorithm = Logic + Control.
    Thine faith must needs be strengthened ;-)
4. nkozyra · 1790956216 · focus · HN ↗
  He's definitely the one guy from the 20th century I can't really reconcile his capability and breadth, other than being an alien or a time traveller.
  1. skrellm · 1791029086 · focus · HN ↗
    An alien (a Martian to be precise), because Douglas Engelbart was the time traveler.
5. tomrod · 1790959941 · focus · HN ↗
  Nash's game theory dissertation was something von Neumann considered obvious and not particularly noteworthy, if I remember my lore right. He was among the first game theorists, focusing more on collaborative games than pure strategic/competitive games.
  Einstein built on the shoulders of Riemann, Gauss, and others when considering the universe might be non-Euclidean!
  All brilliant people, many singular minds of great repute, yet, all improved by the rest.
  1. anthonypasq · 1790960488 · focus · HN ↗
    another famous piece of Von Neumann lore is that he constantly advocated nuking the Soviets.
    sillysaurusx · 1790960856 · focus · HN ↗
    I was wondering if someone would mention this.
    It's interesting how much worse off the world would be if the smartest people were in charge of it.
    What ultimately blocked his nuke proposals? (Why didn't anyone listen?) I'm curious about whatever failsafe that was.
    quickthrowman · 1790962314 · focus · HN ↗
    > What ultimately blocked his nuke proposals? (Why didn't anyone listen?) I'm curious about whatever failsafe that was.
    Are you seriously asking why the US did not launch a decapitation nuclear strike against the USSR?
    estearum · 1790963363 · focus · HN ↗
    1. Big assumption that the world would be worse off in that alternative future, no?
    2. Probably what blocked his proposals is that most people are loath to murder millions of other people (especially if they have ~any other option, including "do nothing")
    myth_drannon · 1790965693 · focus · HN ↗
    It's all psychological inertia. For example even if they knew that Communism would cause tens of millions of deaths they would not nuke USSR.
    podocarp · 1790999687 · focus · HN ↗
    How is nuking some other country a better future. How are you going to argue for that I wonder. You're going to cause millions of deaths even without retaliation. How are you going to justify that, simply because "they're not us"?
    nayroclade · 1791028313 · focus · HN ↗
    He described himself a "violently anti-communist", and he saw nuclear war as an eventual necessity in a civilisational conflict between democracy and totalitarianism. If you view a nuclear war as unavoidable, it's easy to conclude that it's better to get it over with sooner rather than later, since a later war will be even more destructive. Especially since von Neumann was active in the 1940s and 50s, when the west had a slight edge in weapons technology, and before the development of the giant H-bombs. He and a few other pro-nuclear scientists argued there was a brief window where the USA could fight and win a nuclear war against the USSR, and they should take it.
    While it's easy to dismiss that view in hindsight, it's worth considering that von Neumann had personally witnessed the rise of the Nazis and had to flee along with many of his friends and family. And he had seen that regime defeated only by military strength of the USA. And while the USSR and USA never did end up in a nuclear war, it really was only by a series of miracles that it was avoided. I think most historians of the 20th century would agree we got very, very lucky.
    leonidasrup · 1791044246 · focus · HN ↗
    Von Neumann family was affected also by the communist "red terror" in Hungary in 1919, and by the subsequent "white terror" of the militant anti-communist authoritarian government after 1919.
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungary_between_the_World_Wars" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungary_between_the_World_Wars
    estearum · 1791030498 · focus · HN ↗
    I didn’t argue for any of those points. I just said the future is hard to predict (and the counterfactual past hard to trust), so a confident assertion that his preferred strategy would’ve been worse or better is pretty silly.
    hn_acc1 · 1790966947 · focus · HN ↗
    Not sure that it would be worse than letting the other end of the spectrum be in charge of it, as we've seen..
    IAmBroom · 1790968371 · focus · HN ↗
    We can't know.
    As an extreme example, antisemitism was so commonly palatable that an open admirer of Hitler, Charles Lindbergh, was a very serious candidate for the presidency.
    Today, open antisemitism can get one's career derailed in much of the world. Would that be true without the eye-opening shock that the news of the concentration camps produced?
    IN NOW WAY was the Holocaust forgivable, but we simply cannot say if the world today would be "more moral on average" or "less moral on average". Maybe Jews would feel and be far less safe today in predominantly Christian countries. Maybe not.
    All we can say for certain is that the horrors enacted upon the Holocaust victims were evil. As we can surely say that murdering many millions of people living in the USSR would be.
    leonidasrup · 1791045208 · focus · HN ↗
    Nazism had lot of supporters in the US in the 1930s, before WW II.
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism_in_the_Americas" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism_in_the_Americas
    And even after WW II
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_White_People's_Party_(NSWPP)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_White_Peopl...
    senderista · 1790966243 · focus · HN ↗
    Even Bertrand Russell briefly advocated this. "Better dead than Red."
  2. dempedempe · 1790961170 · focus · HN ↗
    Saying that von Neumann was one of the first game theorists undersells it.
    He wrote the original book on game theory! The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior with Oskar Morgenstern.
    Relatedly, MAD was his conception as well.
    mrandish · 1790977486 · focus · HN ↗
    > He wrote the original book on game theory!
    I always found it endearing that von Neumann loved playing poker with friends but was admittedly terrible at it, regularly losing money.
  3. senderista · 1790966149 · focus · HN ↗
    I believe Nash himself didn't consider it particularly noteworthy either, and was far prouder of his work in pure math (like the Nash embedding theorem).
  4. leonidasrup · 1791043640 · focus · HN ↗
    Einstein also cooperated, or competed, with another giant of mathematics, David Hilbert.
    " By 1907, Einstein had framed the fundamentals of the theory of gravity, but then struggled for nearly 8 years to put the theory into its final form. By early summer 1915, Hilbert's interest in physics had focused on general relativity, and he invited Einstein to Göttingen to deliver a week of lectures on the subject. Einstein received an enthusiastic reception at Göttingen. Over the summer, Einstein learned that Hilbert was also working on the field equations and redoubled his own efforts. During November 1915, Einstein published several papers culminating in The Field Equations of Gravitation (see Einstein field equations). Nearly simultaneously, Hilbert published "The Foundations of Physics", an axiomatic derivation of the field equations (Einstein–Hilbert action). Hilbert fully credited Einstein as the originator of the theory and no public priority dispute concerning the field equations ever arose between the two men during their lives. "
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hilbert" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hilbert
6. gradus_ad · 1790968720 · focus · HN ↗
  Genuinely curious, because I know von Neumann was an intellectual giant, but what was his most original/groundbreaking contribution? My impression of his work has always been that he would survey a field, find some particular problem that needed attending to, tidily solve it, then move on to some other domain. But I guess there's a latent assumption there that he didn't do anything huge or groundbreaking.
  1. curt15 · 1790970127 · focus · HN ↗
    "Most" necessarily involves great subjectivity, but how about laying the mathematical foundations for quantum mechanics?
  2. jungturk · 1790983561 · focus · HN ↗
    Battacharya's The Man From the Future is an entertaining read (on JvN's life and achievements)
    flopsamjetsam · 1790984377 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm reading this now, and can confirm it's very entertaining, and gave me more perspective on his life and achievements (coming from a CS background).
    mkl · 1790990109 · focus · HN ↗
    *Bhattacharya
    mkl · 1791041516 · focus · HN ↗
    Not an idle complaint. My library's search isn't fuzzy enough for the misspelled name to work.
chk84us · 1790952000 · focus · HN ↗
Why does it start with page number 382?
1. ketanmaheshwari · 1790952387 · focus · HN ↗
  The PDF is an excerpt from a journal issue: The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 80, No. 4 (April 1973), pp. 382–394.
2. LastTrain · 1790952658 · focus · HN ↗
  It's an article in a journal
Betelbuddy · 1790952114 · focus · HN ↗
"The duties of John von Neumann's assistant" - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16411799">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16411799
jan_m_savage · 1790952149 · focus · HN ↗
for a chance to experience his mind, I recommend his book: "The computer and the brain".
alkyon · 1790952280 · focus · HN ↗
Recently I enjoyed very much The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_MANIAC" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_MANIAC
1. dealmeidaleon · 1790952628 · focus · HN ↗
  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).
2. joenot443 · 1790955513 · focus · HN ↗
  I enjoyed this one a lot.
  For those who've read other books on von Neumann, do you think The MANIAC is a reasonable summary?
  1. helterskelter2 · 1790960180 · focus · HN ↗
    I haven't read MANIAC (yet) but a few years back I was trying to find a good biography of Von Neumann and there are not many; the problem is that he's really difficult to cover comprehensively, even for science historians, because he impacted so many areas of science that you'd practically have to be a von Neumann to create a biography of von Neumann. One could probably get a rough idea of his intelligence by how many science historians it would take to create a comprehensive biography which explains his life and work to a reasonably intelligent layman.
  2. MattGrommes · 1790968110 · focus · HN ↗
    It's less of a strict biography and more of a fictionalized story involving Von Neumann and his wife. As far as I can recall from my reading it was pretty historically accurate though.
    lhd1 · 1790976720 · focus · HN ↗
    there are so many extraordinary things about von Neumann that there seems little need to write a fictionalized account of his life. How is the reader to know what is real and what is fiction?
runlaszlorun · 1790952785 · focus · HN ↗
Fuck a von neumann machine bruv
I'm rawdogging wgsl In a bytecode VM
One type bruv:
alias Value = mat4x4<f32>; alias Buffer = array<Value, 256>; // // mental bruv
runlaszlorun · 1790952858 · focus · HN ↗
I don't know what ww4 will be fought with... But ww3 will be fought With mat4x4<f32> And 2.4 GHz
matltc · 1790953312 · focus · HN ↗
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.
simianwords · 1790953460 · focus · HN ↗
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?
1. grougnax · 1790955685 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
2. gjm11 · 1790957435 · focus · HN ↗
  Because Paul Halmos was an exceptionally good writer. (I greatly enjoyed his "automathography" called "I want to be a mathematician", though it will probably appeal significantly less to people who aren't mathematicians themselves. See also his article "How to write mathematics" at <a href="https://www.math.toronto.edu/mgsa/assets/teaching-seminar/how-to-write-mathematics-halmos.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.math.toronto.edu/mgsa/assets/teaching-seminar/ho....)
  The average Wikipedia contributor (even ignoring the possibility that they might be a robot) is not an exceptionally good writer, because very few people are exceptionally good writers, because that's what "exceptionally" means.
3. stuxnet79 · 1790962937 · focus · HN ↗
  Agreed. This was an enjoyable read. I hope in this era of lazy LLM vomit someone will take it as an example of what clear exposition looks like.
  1. GPerson · 1790987596 · focus · HN ↗
    simianwords is, ironically, one of the biggest LLM lovers on this website. He spends all day shitting on the modern Paul Halmos’s.
bicepjai · 1790954001 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. chihuahua · 1790966322 · focus · HN ↗
  How else would you predict the weather? By observing a frog in a terrarium?
  1. bicepjai · 1790977226 · focus · HN ↗
    Ouch that was harsh Doggy. This is what we get for not using llm to post replies :) Corrected: I never thought first use of supercomputers were for meteorology, which was spearheaded by him.
tbagman · 1790954063 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. random3 · 1790954219 · focus · HN ↗
  How is this relevant?
  1. iaad · 1790958001 · focus · HN ↗
    They're making a comparison to AI, because it has similar qualities (rapid understanding and "perfect" memory). Will AI also be ephemeral or having a lasting impact on mathematics like von Neumann.
    bmitc · 1790960196 · focus · HN ↗
    LLMs do not understand anything.
inasio · 1790954267 · focus · HN ↗
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.
edit: article is called Birds and Frogs, by Freeman Dyson <a href="https://wucj.lab.westlake.edu.cn/Others/Dyson_Birds_and_Frogs.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://wucj.lab.westlake.edu.cn/Others/Dyson_Birds_and_Frog...
1. BeetleB · 1790954687 · focus · HN ↗
  He died from cancer - he was only in his 50's. Unlikely to be dementia.
  1. zamadatix · 1790959439 · focus · HN ↗
    Correct, it was the cancer affecting his brain. Good comment on this at ~55:50 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQp70uqsBV4&t=3470s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQp70uqsBV4&t=3470s
brcmthrowaway · 1790954914 · focus · HN ↗
He was good for the time, but Jane Street and Anthropic have hundreds of equivalent intellects working for them.
1. azan_ · 1790955209 · focus · HN ↗
  Kudos for posting such a good inflammatory comment.
2. adrian_b · 1790960555 · focus · HN ↗
  That may very well be true, but none of those has published anything of comparable importance and quality as any of the many publications of von Neumann.
  Whether some people have really superior intellects is completely irrelevant for the rest of the humans unless they distribute to the others some useful products of their intellect.
  1. sillysaurusx · 1790961364 · focus · HN ↗
    It's an interesting discussion topic. If we have people today who are just as smart and industrious as Neumann, why aren't they making a worldwide impact? Or, if they are, why is the attribution going to the companies they work for instead of them?
    It raises questions like, is it even possible to work for a company while getting credit for world-changing results?
    And it implies that at any point in time, there might be thousands of Neumanns in the world, and that initial conditions matter a lot more than ability.
    brcmthrowaway · 1790961885 · focus · HN ↗
    Golden handcuffs.. the final victory (and tragedy) of American capitalism.
    kaffekaka · 1791010356 · focus · HN ↗
    If there are thousands of JvN in the world, many of them surely have better initial conditions than the real JvN had. All those supposed Anthropic-geniuses ought to have a nearly perfect environment to reach their potential, but it seems it is not happening. I believe von Neumann was simply a _very_ rare kind of person.
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1791051808 · focus · HN ↗
    Individuals, as well as companies, that have worldwide impact do get noticed, whether via the results themselves or peer-nominated recognition such as as Nobel Prizes, or the Fields Medal.
    However, intellectual geniuses are better measured as people who revolutionized or significantly advanced the fields they worked in, and may have received recognition for doing so, not necessarily those who had worldwide impact, which is often more a matter of luck and different character attributes.
    The people we recognize and celebrate as geniuses also tend to be people who had lifelong accomplishments (because they were geniuses, not just one-time lucky), sometime seeing success on whatever they focused their attention on.
    We wouldn't consider Tim Berners-Lee as a genius even though he certainly had world changing impact. Ditto for Demis Hassabis - certainly very smart, but hardly a Feymann. Someone like William Shockley also changed the world, and got plenty of recognition despite working for a commercial lab, but perhaps better regarded just as a bright engineer, right time right place.
    AI is an interesting case, certainly changing the world, but the people who invented the tech, primarily Jacob Uszkoreit and Noam Shazeer, are really more akin to Berners-Lee and Shockley.
    People like Von Neumann and Feymann, who shock other geniuses with their intellect, really are a very rare breed. For people like this I'm not sure that "initial conditions" make much difference - they play by their own rules, and the world comes to them.
3. fourseventy · 1790968707 · focus · HN ↗
  bait
4. HarHarVeryFunny · 1791046226 · focus · HN ↗
  I don't think you can compare few-times-per-generation people like Von Neumann and Feymann with run of the mill smart PhDs.
  It seems the really smart people tend to gravitate to jobs/environments where they can use their intellect rather than just looking for money. You are not going to find an Ed Witten or Terrance Tao working for Jane Street, nor would Von Neumann or Feymann be found at such a place if they were alive today.
  If we had a national Manhatten project for next-gen AI, hiring the brightest and best, then a present day Von Neumann might be there, and I'm pretty sure he would not be sitting at his desk vibe coding RL training environments.
aazo11 · 1790955033 · focus · HN ↗
Anyone interested in von Newmann should read The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut
lwarfield · 1790955072 · focus · HN ↗
Von Nuemann is one of those names that when ever it comes up I sarcastically mentally note "John f***ing Neumann, AGAIN!". It's happened so many times in my studies that I think he might be the most important scientist to have ever lived.
He's also the inspiration for one of favorite characters in fiction, Sherkaner Underhill from A Deepness In The Sky*. :)
1. EvanAnderson · 1790959731 · focus · HN ↗
  > He's also the inspiration for one of favorite characters in fiction, Sherkaner Underhill from A Deepness In The Sky.
  Oh, hell-- that totally makes sense and I completely missed it until now. Thanks for mentioning that-- it adds some additional depth to a book and a character I already enjoy a ton.
  1. jayGlow · 1791049565 · focus · HN ↗
    it's funny when reading the book I thought that character was ridiculous, one man being that good in so many different fields come on! wild to realize that people like that really can exist.
2. bmitc · 1790960101 · focus · HN ↗
  I wouldn't be surprised if he's at least partially an inspiration for the Dr. Felix Hoenikker character in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle.
  1. atombender · 1790981103 · focus · HN ↗
    Vonnegut's inspiration was Nobel prize winner Irving Langmuir [1], apparently.
    In my opinion, Hoenikker is just too amoral and aloof to really match any one of the Manhattan Project scientists. Teller (who suggested using atomic weapons to excavate harbours) and Fermi (who before the Trinity test took bets on whether the bomb would light the atmosphere on fire) are maybe the closest contenders.
    [1] <a href="https://gizmodo.com/the-real-life-scientist-who-inspired-kurt-vonneguts-ca-1447276268" rel="nofollow">https://gizmodo.com/the-real-life-scientist-who-inspired-kur...
    bmitc · 1791156701 · focus · HN ↗
    Ahh, interesting. Thanks for the info!
    Von Neumann was himself pretty pro atomic bomb, though, and wanted to preemptively bomb the Soviet Union.
3. abecedarius · 1790966396 · focus · HN ↗
  Do you have inside info about that inspiration? At one point a human character monitoring from space thinks Underhill seems like several Dawn Age geniuses rolled into one and thinks he must be a figurehead for a collective (iirc). But that's a bit different from the author taking off mainly from him. vN isn't mainly known as a font of crazy ideas -- more like supremely fast & precise intellect.
4. mwigdahl · 1790967152 · focus · HN ↗
  Also for Doctor Strangelove.
  1. atombender · 1790980466 · focus · HN ↗
    Dr. Strangelove was mostly inspired by Werner von Braun (according to Peter Sellers). Clearly there are bits of many other people in that characterization, not just one.
ricksunny · 1790955310 · focus · HN ↗
Feels appropriate to mention here recent HN mentions about who deserves credit for 'von Neumann architecture"
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49870485">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49870485
1. dandersch · 1790955621 · focus · HN ↗
  Could the controversy behind it be the reason that the author ommitted it? It was established terminology by 1973, as far as I can tell.
  1. ricksunny · 1790957291 · focus · HN ↗
    > It was established terminology by 1973, as far as I can tell
    That's a worthwhile observation. The 1973 article anyway doesn't go into depth about comparative computer architecture. It's also possible the term's currency in computer science circles hadn't yet crossed into Halmos' mathematics circles, but I wouldn't know.
2. adrian_b · 1790957358 · focus · HN ↗
  The conclusion is that von Neumann deserves the credit for the "von Neumann architecture", despite any contrary claims of Eckert or Mauchly.
  Herman Goldstine, who distributed the document and John von Neumann, who wrote it, are the reason for the explosive growth of the computer industry during the following decades.
  The paper written by von Neumann was an exemplary model of clarity and good logical thinking. Nothing ever written by Eckert or Mauchly was at a comparable level.
  Everyone who read that paper understood immediately how to design and build an electronic automatic computer, and a great number of teams in many countries all over the world did precisely this, so a decade later there already existed experimental electronic computers in many countries and also commercial electronic computers in the UK and in USA.
  Some of the details from the paper must have been learned by von Neumann from discussions with the ENIAC team, but others were obviously von Neumann's own ideas, e.g. the use for the main memory of an iconoscope tube with fast random access, i.e. a DRAM like today, instead of the slow serial delay lines chosen by Eckert and Mauchly for their following computers.
  Whatever von Neumann has learned from the ENIAC team, he obviously understood better than the people who taught him, allowing him to formulate general principles for the organization of an automatic computer.
  The publication of the von Neumann paper allowed the concurrent development of many computers in many places, and each of those projects found various improvements that were essential in making the electronic computers successful commercial products.
  If Eckert and Mauchly had succeeded to block any competitors, then the evolution of computers might have been delayed by up to 2 decades, until any patents would have expired, because Eckert and Mauchly have never done later any significant innovations and they would have never succeeded to develop better computers at the pace that happened due to the von Neumann paper.
  Moreover, Eckert and Mauchly had a history themselves of failing to mention their sources of inspiration, so they were not the people entitled to complain about someone "stealing" ideas from them.
  Before ENIAC, the first electronic computer in USA was the Atanasoff-Berry computer. That computer was a special-purpose computer, designed for solving systems of linear algebraic equations. However, ENIAC was a special-purpose computer too, unlike the relay-based computers that were older than it, like the Harvard Mark I computer, as even its name implies (Numerical Integrator and Computer).
  ENIAC was conceived as a replacement for the older mechanical "differential analyzers", which were used to solve ordinary differential equations, e.g. for computing artillery tables, so its architecture mimicked the architecture of the mechanical differential analyzers, and it was reconfigured for new problems in a similar manner with those, by rewiring.
  John Vincent Atanasoff had written in 1940 a very high-quality document about the design of his computer: “Computing Machine for the Solution of Large Systems of Linear Algebraic Equations”. It is unknown if anyone of the ENIAC team had read it, but it is known that one of them had visited the designers of the Atanasoff-Berry computer, inquiring about the electronic circuits used by them to implement arithmetic operations and data storage. Later, during the design of ENIAC and after that, they never mentioned any connection with the earlier electronic computer.
  1. ricksunny · 1790958651 · focus · HN ↗
    Perhaps, not taking a position currently on this. But I've long been uncomfortable with the term 'random access' for random access memory (RAM) as it implies that the concept of 'randomness' is somehow a required and fundamental property of the memory technology described, when it's not. 'Arbitrary access' is a much more appropriately encapsulating description of the function of the memory at hand. Alas, the incumbency of terminology.
    adrian_b · 1790959312 · focus · HN ↗
    I agree with you.
    Nonetheless, the programs whose performance is limited by the speed of the main memory can be divided in programs whose performance is limited by the throughput of the memory interface and programs whose performance is limited by the latency of the memory accesses.
    The programs from the first class will have the same performance when using a serial memory or a RAM, if they are equally fast for sequential access, but for programs from the second class, it is important to have a RAM as the main memory.
    In order to measure the performance achievable by programs from the second class on a given computer, it is necessary to run a benchmark where the addresses of the memory accesses are generated by a good random-number generator.
    The reason is that modern CPUs have a variety of hardware prefetchers that attempt to predict the next memory address, so for meaningful results that reflect the true performance of the memory you need truly random addresses that are impossible to guess by the hardware.
  2. HarHarVeryFunny · 1790964318 · focus · HN ↗
    Von Neumann's architecture (i.e. report on the EDVAC) didn't focus on random-access memory, and in fact his whole discussion on memory is rather rambling. The EDVAC itself, which the report is nominally describing, used serial-access mercury delay line memory. What really matters from an architectural POV is memory address-ability, not speed of access (random vs serial).
    The whole document is, as the title promises, really more of an engineering one - a report on the EDVAC - rather than some clean abstract treatise on computer architecture.
    <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130314123032/http://qss.stanford.edu/~godfrey/vonNeumann/vnedvac.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20130314123032/http://qss.stanfo...
    somethinsfishy · 1790968471 · focus · HN ↗
    When the report was written there wasn't any random access memory. The only memory suited to computers in 1946 was the ultrasonic delay line as implemented by Eckert. What makes it not-random access is that all the bits in the store are being constantly shifted and counted in a loop (about 1Mhz?), so you have to wait for the word you want to read/write to fly past and the controller grabs it then.
    adrian_b · 1791030163 · focus · HN ↗
    The document written by Atanasoff in 1940, which I have mentioned in another comment, analyzed all the known devices suitable to be used as memories and it proposed the first kind of DRAM, made with discrete capacitors, as the best combination of low price and high speed.
    However, during the war this document was known by few.
    Delay lines were already used as analog memories in radars and from there Eckert and Mauchly took them and modified them to be used as digital memories.
    Von Neumann learned about the delay line memories from the ENIAC team, but he did not like the idea, because serial access seemed too slow, so he proposed to use instead of delay lines the second kind of DRAM, with a cathode-ray tube instead of discrete capacitors. Von Neumann took the idea of using a CRT as a memory from the tubes used in video cameras for television, which used an analog memory to store the image after exposure to light.
    So when the report was written, probably von Neumann was not aware of the earlier RAM used by Atanasoff in his computer, but he also proposed a RAM as being better suited for computers than delay lines. Von Neumann was proven right a few years later, when at Manchester Williams made such DRAMs with cathode-ray tubes, which were later used in many commercial computers, e.g. in the first generation of IBM computers, until the development of magnetic core memories made obsolete both the delay lines and the Williams tubes (until the magnetic cores were made themselves obsolete 20 years later, during the seventies, by the third kind of DRAM, with MOS integrated circuits).
    A few years later
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1791032582 · focus · HN ↗
    It's interesting to read Von Neumann's perspective on CRT ("iconoscope") memory - saying how important it was not to lose the serial aspect of it since of course(!) you would not want to specify the address for every access, with most memory accesses being sequential (presumably meaning each bit of a 44-bit word), but it was advantageous to gain the speed of occasionally switching read location, which would be slower and more costly to do with delay lines (more, shorter, delay lines).
    Note that Atanasoff's capacitor-based memory was based on rows of capacitors arranged around a mechanical rotating drum (a bit reminiscent of the later EDSAC's "initial orders" module!), so it wasn't true random access - there would be a rotational delay to get access to a given row. In a way it was as much a predecessor of rotating mass storage devices as it was of DRAM.
    I just missed the core memory era myself, at least as a user, learning to program (while in highschool) on an IBM mainframe in the mid-late 70's, which was already using semiconductor memory. Still, years ago I bought a core memory module and a (very similar size) etched 6" silicon wafer, intending to frame them side-by-side as the defining story of my era - the switch from physical to solid state integrated electronics.
    ricksunny · 1791052483 · focus · HN ↗
    finally, a bonafide non-LLLm (c. 2026) answer! :)
  3. tovej · 1790968761 · focus · HN ↗
    No, von Neumann does not deserve credit for stealing Eckerts and Mauchleys life work.
    von Neumann deserves credit for many things, but not this.
    He famously brought a lawyer with him to a meeting after they wanted to discuss the report and the rights of their invention. The whole ENIAC saga has made me reconsider von Neumann as a person. He was a talented mathematician, sure, but he seems to have also been a greedy scumbag.
    Eckert and Mauchley did not try to conceal their inspiration from Atanasoff, although I believe there was a court case on this topic.
    And it is completely ridiculous to claim that von Neumann would have been able to describe the computer better than its inventors.
    It's eaually ridiculous to consider that they would not have published themselves. They were collaborating with von Neumann on the report after all.
    Goldstine and von Neumann stole the credit from Eckert and Mauchley, that is documented history.
  4. Animats · 1790968797 · focus · HN ↗
    As I point out occasionally, the bottleneck in early computing was memory. There were no good memory devices for quite a while. IBM had electronic arithmetic in test before WWII, and that eventually emerged as the IBM 603 Electronic Multiplier (1946). That was the first mass-produced electronic calculation device. From IBM's perspective, they needed something reliable enough to install at customer sites that would run without repair techs on site. IBM's electromechanical machines already worked that well, and businesses could get work done. So there was a lot of work that had to be done on tubes, sockets, wiring, soldering, and packaging before they could ship.
    Eckert and Mauchley came from a background of trying to get compute done with modified IBM hardware. They were painfully familiar with the lack-of-memory problem. Everybody involved with that era of machinery was. (I've used IBM plugboard wired tabulators, like the one at the Computer Museum in Mountain View. My high school had one.) The ENIAC had a workaround for lack of memory, huge rolling cabinets of manually set rotary switches. If something better had been available, it would have been used. You have to appreciate how much early architecture was restricted by available components.
    The first real hardware breakthrough was acoustic delay-line memory. First mercury tanks, then long coils of steel wire. Once that was available, it was clear that was the place to put the program. But it took a while to make that work reliably. Then there was Williams tube electrostatic storage, and high speed drums, which got things going. Sort of. Memory cost was an issue well into the 1980s. In the early 1970s, a megabyte cost a million dollars. Cheap memory didn't appear until the 1990s.
    The big lack in Von Neumann's architecture was index registers. He was into storing into the address part of instructions. The Manchester Mark I had the first index register (the "B box"), at which point programs could be read-only and still be able to index arrays. That completed the basic CPU architecture.
    ilamont · 1790975859 · focus · HN ↗
    > I've used IBM plugboard wired tabulators
    This is a genuinely rare experience. Was it like old hardware on a shelf that no one knew what to do with and you tried it out? Or this was how lessons/clubs/assignments got things done, using an antique IBM tabulator?
    When I started public high school near Boston in the early 80s we didn't have Apples or TRS 80s or PCs, it was terminals that used printed output ... can't remember the details, maybe DECwriter to PDP 11.
    Animats · 1791061636 · focus · HN ↗
    It was obsolete even when I was in high school, but the school had the basic set of unit record equipment - tabulator, sorter, collator, keypunch. Computers hadn't filtered down to high schools yet.
    ricksunny · 1791018829 · focus · HN ↗
    >The big lack in Von Neumann's architecture was index registers. He was into storing into the address part of instructions. The Manchester Mark I had the first index register (the "B box"), at which point programs could be read-only and still be able to index arrays. That completed the basic CPU architecture. e strikes me as gilding the lily (and possibly even a claude-esque 'one caveat' flourish.) Addressable memory, where any given addressed memory register can contain not just conventional data to be operated on but can also contain an address of some other memory register to jump to. is what strikes me as the highly-enriched uranium of computer architecture. indexing an array is a feature bump by comparison.
    adrian_b · 1791029247 · focus · HN ↗
    The early computers that did not have index registers realized the equivalent of indexed addressing by modifying the address fields of the instructions before they were executed, e.g. during a loop.
    In the early computers with non-pipelined execution and without cache memories, and also without security concerns, modifying the executable program during execution did not have disadvantages.
    Nonetheless, pipelined execution became widely used and also cache memories appeared soon, and such performance-enhancing techniques could not work well with self-modifying programs, so index registers became absolutely necessary in fast CPUs.
    Animats · 1791060529 · focus · HN ↗
    Being able to store into the program was once considered much more important than it is now. Today we almost always load code, lock it read-only, and run it. Even JIT compilers don't patch much. They mostly generate code into empty memory. (There are exceptions. I think PyPy patches existing when a Python program replaces an existing function while running. You can do this in Python, but probably shouldn't.) Von Neumann considered self-modifying code important for somewhat philosophical reasons related to his self-replicating automata ideas.
    Previous pre-computer programmable machines, back to the Jacquard loom, stored programs in a completely different medium than the data. Plugboards, chains of Jacquard cards, cams, etc. Von Neumann insisted that programs were just data and belonged in the same memory as the data. This was a conceptual advance. The hardware had to get there to make it work.
    The next big innovation was the stack, in the modern sense. This came later than one might expect. Note that there are at least two types of stack computers. There are ones with a return point and context stack, which is the C view of the world. And there are ones where working storage is on the stack, like Forth machines and early Burroughs machines. The first kind seems to have been invented for ALGOL in 1957, because ALGOL allowed recursion. Stacks made a lot of people nervous back then, because how much memory to allocate for the stack was unclear, and there wasn't much memory. FORTRAN disallowed recursion and thus did not need stacks and stack frames.
    So storing into the program hung on in some architectures. UNIVAC 1107 and later mainframes had a Store Location Jump (SLJ) instruction. This stored the return address into the beginning of a subroutine. Not into a stack frame; there was no stack by default. Into the first word of the subroutine's code. For non-recursive non-concurrent code, it worked.[1] But it was used less over time, with different constructs used instead.
    Program in the same memory as data, yes. Program can create more program, yes. Program modifies itself while running, not so good. Index registers eliminate most needs for the third case.
    [1] <a href="https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/univac/instructions.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/univac/instructions.html
    adrian_b · 1791027985 · focus · HN ↗
    The Williams tube electrostatic storage was just the practical implementation of the proposal made by von Neumann in his report, where it was referred as an "iconoscope tube memory".
    An iconoscope was a cathode-ray tube used in video cameras, where it allowed the reading of every pixel of an image, where the value of the pixel consisted of the electric charge stored at that point (where the amount of charge depended on the light exposure of a photoconductive plate). Williams did exactly what von Neumann had suggested, combining the reading of the memory like in an iconoscope tube with the writing of the memory like in a CRT display tube.
    The first commercial IBM fully-electronic computers, IBM 701 for scientific computing and IBM 702 for business data processing, used William tubes, according to the von Neumann proposal. The Williams tube memory of the IBM computers was an advantage over the Univac computers, which were still using the slow delay line memories invented by Eckert and Mauchly (which had been derived from the delay lines used as analog memories in radars, during the war).
    The next generation of IBM computers switched to the magnetic core memory invented at MIT.
rawmaterial · 1790956860 · focus · HN ↗
To whoever speaks German or can stand auto subtitles:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH2ZVSDYgK0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH2ZVSDYgK0
breput · 1790956903 · focus · HN ↗
My favorite von Neumann anecdote was a quote from Edward Teller: "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."
1. skrellm · 1791029409 · focus · HN ↗
  This is my favorite:
  In this puzzle, two bicycles begin 20 miles apart, and each travels toward the other at 10 miles per hour until they collide; meanwhile, a fly travels continuously back and forth between the bicycles at 15 miles per hour until it is squashed in the collision.
  The questioner asks how far the fly traveled in total; the "trick" for a quick answer is to realize that the fly's individual transits do not matter, only that it has been traveling at 15 miles per hour for one hour.
  As Eugene Wigner tells it, Max Born posed the riddle to von Neumann. The other scientists to whom he had posed it had laboriously computed the distance, so when von Neumann was immediately ready with the correct answer of 15 miles, Born observed that he must have guessed the trick. "What trick?" von Neumann replied. "All I did was sum the geometric series.”
  1. monktastic1 · 1791033150 · focus · HN ↗
    Whenever I read this anecdote, I hope it is at least partially made up. I don't want to believe that none of these towering intellects (let alone von Neumann himself) didn't instantly recognize the more elegant way to view the problem. Technical abilities aside, that's the part that's always made them so impressive to me.
    skrellm · 1791050200 · focus · HN ↗
    > Whenever I read this anecdote, I want to believe it is largely made up. I don't want to believe that none of these towering intellects (let alone von Neumann himself) didn't instantly recognize the more elegant way to view the problem.
    Knowing some bright minds I totally believe it.
    Smart people tend to focus (zoom in) on one problem, entirely forgetting about the bigger picture (unless they "take a bath"). I guess von Neumann was likewise. I can totally imagine that he had to do calculations like this on a daily basis when the puzzle was presented to him, so he simply did what he was doing all along without examining the puzzle from another angle.
    rsaarelm · 1791094503 · focus · HN ↗
    I got the impression that it was more about mathematical sums being one of top items in von Neumann's mathematical toolkit, and he was really well-practiced in doing those. Then when he heard the puzzle he pattern-matched it to a problem he'd already solved enough times in his work to know it offhand, he didn't brute-force in his head 100x faster than other people who were rustier on sums and needed to brute-force things in their head.
dang · 1790959019 · focus · HN ↗
Related. Others?
The legend of John von Neumann (1973) - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8212335">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8212335 - Aug 2014 (65 comments)
The Legend of John von Neumann - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1427906">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1427906 - June 2010 (4 comments)
(Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers)
1. lern_too_spel · 1790959429 · focus · HN ↗
  The best one is:
  John von Neumann Shot Lightning from His Arse (2025) - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45930838">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45930838 (5 comments)
Johnyjohnson123 · 1790960182 · focus · HN ↗
Shouldve bee the man instea dof chuck norris
GodelNumbering · 1790960503 · focus · HN ↗
von Neumann was one of the very very few people that I struggle to place in any single template. From all the facts already present in the pdf and elsewhere, it does become immediately obvious that he had both superhuman memory and an extremely fast processor (although it is unclear if his brain followed a von Neumann architecture).
My template had guessed,
"sounds like someone who enjoyed working in quiet spaces" -> Nope, he liked loud environments to get his brain going (apparently Einstein once complained about Neumann being noisy)
"he would have been a focused person" -> Nope, he never worked on anything for too long
"unlikely to be motivated by money" -> Nope, he famously “loved money” according to Wigner [1]
"probably not someone who stares at women" -> nope, at Los Alamos, secretaries sometimes put cardboard across the open fronts of their desks because otherwise Neumann would stare
Tl;Dr: I find him fascinating.
[1]: interestingly, there was a group of Jewish Hungarian scientists - von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, and Theodore von Karman - all brilliant, all born within one-mile-radius circle in downtown Budapest, all emigrated to the US, collectively known as Martians by their colleagues.
1. HarHarVeryFunny · 1790965741 · focus · HN ↗
  Feymann shared these qualities too, but seems he would have been more interesting to meet - more of a normal, yet brilliantly smart, person, unlike Von Neumann who while being a bon vivant also seems to have been a bit "off" with his inability to drive safely, not remembering where the drinking glasses in his own house were, etc.
nickdothutton · 1790962015 · focus · HN ↗
I occasionally wonder... who is the von Neumann of today. Where are they? What are they working on? Are they being given everything they might need to focus on their work? How can we find them? What signal are we looking for?
1. SV_BubbleTime · 1790978220 · focus · HN ↗
  They’re around.
  They’re hard at work increasing Meta ad clicks by 1% over the next three years.
2. fliglr · 1790981766 · focus · HN ↗
  They went into finance
3. kaffekaka · 1791009441 · focus · HN ↗
  How frequent are von Neumanns? Maybe none exist today. He seemed quite unique.
  Or is stuff just harder today? So that even the really, really intelligent people don't make breakthroughs nearly as often.
seemaze · 1790963513 · focus · HN ↗
highly recommend: Turings Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson[0]
it covers von Nuemann’s time developing the IAS machine at Princeton.
[0] <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/44425/turings-cathedral-by-george-dyson/" rel="nofollow">https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/44425/turings-cathe...
rookienumbers30 · 1790968871 · focus · HN ↗
Apparently he liked to play German marching bands at top volume while he worked in his office at the Institute for Advanced Studies, which greatly annoyed his neighbor Einstein.
SA9G · 1790985932 · focus · HN ↗
By all accounts a magnificent intellect and certainly my hero. I am not sure what, if anything, will happen on the other side... but if I were to return as a human (and not a dung beetle as I expect), I would very much like to have his brain capacity. At least that is what I will put on the form if anyone or anything asks.
Importantly, are we all genetically inferior or is there perhaps a component of nurture that we lack? How is it that we are all so stupid in comparison?
[deleted] · 1791021636 · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
losvedir · 1791034876 · focus · HN ↗
von Neumann is a warning for me related to AI. Here he was, the smartest man alive, and he wanted to preemptively nuke the USSR. Thank goodness "less intelligent" heads prevailed.
mounceyboy · 1791035916 · focus · HN ↗
Did they put in the two jokes that his brother talked about?
1. mounceyboy · 1791038032 · focus · HN ↗
  Oh, I see they didn't and they only mention his brothers once. His brother wrote that they joked a lot around the dinner table. I remember one about the lawyer, and another about the Kaiser.
bluecheese452 · 1791036091 · focus · HN ↗
So it has brought to my attention that mentioning his ethnicity is inappropriate and worthy of flagging.
Since the article does that it should be flagged and this discussion should not be taking place.
1. bronlund · 1791036936 · focus · HN ↗
  Are you retarded?
baud9600 · 1791067085 · focus · HN ↗
One omission is Turing! Halmos gives JvN considerable credit for electronic computing without ever mentioning Turing or the connection between Turing’s universal machine and the stored-program computer.
While the paper mentions the IAS in Princeton, it only briefly refers to the computer project which JvN directed, describing the IAS machine as “his electronic computer”. This is a surprisingly slight mention of a major project that ran for years and was highly influential (the project is the subject of George Dyson’s book “Turing’s Cathedral”, recommended).

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