4 ms·
Von Neumann was often considered by colleagues to be the smartest person they'd ever met. There's an old story that goes something like this: Von Neumann was a
by bbctol 10y ago
Von Neumann was often considered by colleagues to be the smartest person they'd ever met. There's an old story that goes something like this:
Von Neumann was asked a mathematical puzzle: two bicyclists start 20 miles apart and head towards each other at a steady speed of 10 mph each. At the same time, a fly that travels at a steady 15 mph starts from the front wheel of the southbound bicycle and heads to the front wheel of the northbound one, then immediately turns around and heads to the wheel of the southbound one, and continues until the bicycles meet and he is crushed. What total distance did the fly travel?
The trick is that it seems you'd need to compute an infinite series, figuring out the distance traveled on the first journey, then the second, then the third and sum them all. In fact, you can just realize that two bicycles starting 20 miles away, each moving at 10 miles an hour, will meet in 1 hour; if the fly's traveling at 15 mph constantly during that time, it travels 15 miles.
Von Neumann provided the solution immediately. The man who posed it to him said "Oh, you must have heard the trick already!" "What trick?" said von Neumann. "I just summed the geometric series!"
- agumonkey 10y agoAre there more anecdotes of this kind ?
- bbctol 10y agoThere are a number of stories about von Neumann, but almost all of them are apocryphal. I do remember his former professors remarking that if they put unsolved problems on the chalkboard, he'd have them solved by the end of class.
- Jach 10y agoFermi and von Neumann overlapped. They collaborated on problems of Taylor instabilities and they wrote a report. When Fermi went back to Chicago after that work he called in his very close collaborator, namely Herbert Anderson, a young Ph.D. student at Columbia, a collaboration that began from Fermi's very first days at Columbia and lasted up until the very last moment. Herb was an experimental physicist. (If you want to know about Fermi in great detail, you would do well to interview Herbert Anderson.) But, at any rate, when Fermi got back he called in Herb Anderson to his office and he said, "You know, Herb, how much faster I am in thinking than you are. That is how much faster von Neumann is compared to me." From http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/03/differences-are-enormous.html http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/03/differences-are-enormou...
- agumonkey 10y agoCool quote and article. To be honest, not summing a serie on the fly, I found the problem ridiculously simple. I'm very curious about his love for algebra. ps: Fr/De https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9pL_3tTW2c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9pL_3tTW2c Us https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTS9O0CoVng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTS9O0CoVng
- carapace 10y agoLegend has it that when Gödel presented his incompleteness theorem Von Neumann understood that Hilbert's program was destroyed and immediately threw in the towel.
- sina 10y agoThe way I solved it was to say that the bicycles meet in the middle because their velocities are equal. They travel this 20/2=10 miles with v=10mph in 1 hour. In this 1 hour, the fly will travel 15 miles, no matter how often it changes its direction.