9 ms·

Dr. John von Neumann at the dedication of the NORD (1954)

54 points by bindidwodtj 7y ago

chrisco255 7y ago
It would be nice to have a web-friendly audio format for these rather than .au.
- ipnon 7y ago
  These "natively" formatted HTML documents are perfect for the Firefox reader view, which includes text-to-audio.
  - peteradio 7y ago
    Good point, but unfortunately the text is a subset of the audio and we wouldn't hear it in von Neumann's own voice.
- andylynch 7y ago
  This page looks to be from the mid-nineties, when it probably was- I was still pleasantly surprised the audio played just fine in my iPhone browser 25 years later!
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    Sadly it doesn't appear to work in Chrome on Android.
ipnon 7y ago
Imagine von Neumann on a podcast like Lex Fridman's "AI Podcast" or Eric Weinstein's "The Portal". Would this diminish our view of his legacy, for him to come "down to earth"?
- ZhuanXia 7y ago
  >Would this diminish our view of his legacy, for him to come "down to earth"? I doubt it. Consider how the greatest minds of the 20th century thought of him: "I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jansci [John] von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed me." — Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner "You know, Herb, how much faster I am in thinking than you are. That is how much faster von Neumann is compared to me." — Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi to his former PhD student Herb Anderson. "One of his remarkable abilities was his power of absolute recall. As far as I could tell, von Neumann was able on once reading a book or article to quote it back verbatim; moreover, he could do it years later without hesitation. He could also translate it at no diminution in speed from its original language into English. On one occasion I tested his ability by asking him to tell me how The Tale of Two Cities started. Whereupon, without any pause, he immediately began to recite the first chapter and continued until asked to stop after about ten or fifteen minutes." — Herman Goldstine, mathematician and computer pioneer. "I always thought Von Neumann’s brain indicated that he was from another species, an evolution beyond man." — Nobel Laureate Hans A. Bethe. In his final days, Neumann tragically lost his genius to brain cancer. His friend Edward Teller said this about it: “I think that von Neumann suffered more when his mind would no longer function, than I have ever seen any human being suffer." Gwern has a funny essay about cloning Von Neumann here: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection#glue-robbers-sequencing-nobelists-using-collectible-letters https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection#glue-robbers-sequenci... As Neumann seemed to be god-like intelligent, highly personable, and very kind, if we were to clone any historical figure, he seems like a good bet!
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - p1esk 7y ago
    He also said something like “if we can nuke them today, why wait till tomorrow?”, referring to the Soviets.
Game_Ender 7y ago
I believe this machine is really the NORC [0]. Some highlights from the Wikipedia article: It had 2000 words of memory, each that stored a ~13 digit decimal number and it ran at about ~15000 operations/second. It was considered the most powerful computer in the word when released, and at the dedication it set a record for pi @ 3089 digits, calculated in 13 minutes. 0 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Naval_Ordnance_Research_Calculator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Naval_Ordnance_Research_...
- bindidwodtj 7y ago
  It is! I didn't notice, I just copied the title
tomcam 7y ago
Thrilling if you know who he is. Also nice not to hear the awful (to me) mid-Atlantic accent favored by American public speakers until about 1995
- jacobolus 7y ago
  > nice not to hear the awful (to me) mid-Atlantic accent Why would a native Hungarian who moved to the US in his mid 20s use an affected prestige accent from the US Northeast?
  - amylene 7y ago
    The same reason anyone did: signal status. Immigrants can be self conscious of their accents, so it seems even more likely that a normal person would feel that impulse. JvN was no ordinary person.

54 points by bindidwodtj 7y ago

chrisco255 7y ago

It would be nice to have a web-friendly audio format for these rather than .au.

ipnon 7y ago
These "natively" formatted HTML documents are perfect for the Firefox reader view, which includes text-to-audio.
- peteradio 7y ago
  Good point, but unfortunately the text is a subset of the audio and we wouldn't hear it in von Neumann's own voice.
andylynch 7y ago
This page looks to be from the mid-nineties, when it probably was- I was still pleasantly surprised the audio played just fine in my iPhone browser 25 years later!
- chrisco255 7y ago
  Sadly it doesn't appear to work in Chrome on Android.

ipnon 7y ago

Imagine von Neumann on a podcast like Lex Fridman's "AI Podcast" or Eric Weinstein's "The Portal". Would this diminish our view of his legacy, for him to come "down to earth"?

ZhuanXia 7y ago
>Would this diminish our view of his legacy, for him to come "down to earth"? I doubt it. Consider how the greatest minds of the 20th century thought of him: "I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jansci [John] von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed me." — Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner "You know, Herb, how much faster I am in thinking than you are. That is how much faster von Neumann is compared to me." — Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi to his former PhD student Herb Anderson. "One of his remarkable abilities was his power of absolute recall. As far as I could tell, von Neumann was able on once reading a book or article to quote it back verbatim; moreover, he could do it years later without hesitation. He could also translate it at no diminution in speed from its original language into English. On one occasion I tested his ability by asking him to tell me how The Tale of Two Cities started. Whereupon, without any pause, he immediately began to recite the first chapter and continued until asked to stop after about ten or fifteen minutes." — Herman Goldstine, mathematician and computer pioneer. "I always thought Von Neumann’s brain indicated that he was from another species, an evolution beyond man." — Nobel Laureate Hans A. Bethe. In his final days, Neumann tragically lost his genius to brain cancer. His friend Edward Teller said this about it: “I think that von Neumann suffered more when his mind would no longer function, than I have ever seen any human being suffer." Gwern has a funny essay about cloning Von Neumann here: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection#glue-robbers-sequencing-nobelists-using-collectible-letters https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection#glue-robbers-sequenci... As Neumann seemed to be god-like intelligent, highly personable, and very kind, if we were to clone any historical figure, he seems like a good bet!
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- p1esk 7y ago
  He also said something like “if we can nuke them today, why wait till tomorrow?”, referring to the Soviets.

Game_Ender 7y ago

I believe this machine is really the NORC [0]. Some highlights from the Wikipedia article: It had 2000 words of memory, each that stored a ~13 digit decimal number and it ran at about ~15000 operations/second. It was considered the most powerful computer in the word when released, and at the dedication it set a record for pi @ 3089 digits, calculated in 13 minutes. 0 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Naval_Ordnance_Research_Calculator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Naval_Ordnance_Research_...

bindidwodtj 7y ago
It is! I didn't notice, I just copied the title

tomcam 7y ago

Thrilling if you know who he is. Also nice not to hear the awful (to me) mid-Atlantic accent favored by American public speakers until about 1995

jacobolus 7y ago
> nice not to hear the awful (to me) mid-Atlantic accent Why would a native Hungarian who moved to the US in his mid 20s use an affected prestige accent from the US Northeast?
- amylene 7y ago
  The same reason anyone did: signal status. Immigrants can be self conscious of their accents, so it seems even more likely that a normal person would feel that impulse. JvN was no ordinary person.