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.
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.
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".
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)
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?
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.
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".
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 its central dictum, Algorithm = Logic + Control.
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.
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. 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")
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
"
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.
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).
srejk · · focus · HN ↗
snapetom · · focus · HN ↗
harpersealtako · · focus · HN ↗
lalalandland · · focus · HN ↗
hnfong · · focus · HN ↗
Otherwise why not just replace them with a script (or these days, an AI)
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SideQuark · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
amunozo · · focus · HN ↗
IAmBroom · · focus · HN ↗
It's like an analog to the fact that almost all people consider themselves funny.
ahazred8ta · · focus · HN ↗
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[dead]
chucksmash · · focus · HN ↗
If somebody truly believes they have a useful model then they don't discouraged by academic gatekeeping, they go and build Time Cube.
cycomanic · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
kaffekaka · · focus · HN ↗
colinhb · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
However, the gatekeeping you mention definitely occurs to mere mortals who might have an interesting bend on existing ideas.
KylerAce · · focus · HN ↗
jltsiren · · focus · HN ↗
"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.
helterskelter2 · · focus · HN ↗
JoeAltmaier · · focus · HN ↗
Trouble with that startup was, the medical folks with money don't use computer tools. And the students in training have no money.
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JoeAltmaier · · focus · HN ↗
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mmulqueen · · focus · HN ↗
<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 · · focus · HN ↗
Animats · · focus · HN ↗
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<a href="https://improbable.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ThereAreNone.gif" rel="nofollow">https://improbable.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ThereAreNo...
api · · focus · HN ↗
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IAmBroom · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
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cma · · focus · HN ↗
ricksunny · · focus · HN ↗
DonHopkins · · focus · HN ↗
<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 · · focus · HN ↗
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 its central dictum, Algorithm = Logic + Control.
Thine faith must needs be strengthened ;-)
nkozyra · · focus · HN ↗
skrellm · · focus · HN ↗
tomrod · · focus · HN ↗
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.
anthonypasq · · focus · HN ↗
sillysaurusx · · focus · HN ↗
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.
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estearum · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
podocarp · · focus · HN ↗
nayroclade · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
<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 · · focus · HN ↗
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IAmBroom · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
<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 · · focus · HN ↗
dempedempe · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
I always found it endearing that von Neumann loved playing poker with friends but was admittedly terrible at it, regularly losing money.
senderista · · focus · HN ↗
leonidasrup · · focus · HN ↗
" 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
gradus_ad · · focus · HN ↗
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mkl · · focus · HN ↗