5 ms·

> Most anecdotes about von Neumann abide by this three-act structure: a question that baffles the best minds; their sweaty, pointless deliberations; von Neumann

> Most anecdotes about von Neumann abide by this three-act structure: a question that baffles the best minds; their sweaty, pointless deliberations; von Neumann’s swift, soaring leap to the solution. (Sometimes, as in the Rand Corporation tale, the question itself goes undescribed. Its sole attribute of importance is its impenetrability.) This type of storytelling reinforces the tale of mental ability being an innate talent that doesn't need work or practice that American media loves to tell. In practice, it is much more interesting to (try to) work out how people were able to work out difficult questions on the spot. Famous examples: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Vi%C3%A8te#Adriaan_van_Roomen's_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Vi%C3%A8te#Adria... (I imagine trigonometric identities were kind of Viète's thing) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_number (Ramanujan had worked on 'taxicab numbers' before)

nabla9 5y ago
Reality is multicausal. Neumann could divide 8-digit numbers in his head when he was 8-years old. At age 8 he already mastered basic differential and integral calculus. Neuman was genius who studied math over several decades. I propose the following: (1) People like him are born, not created. They have innate abilities. (2) People like him still need to study.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  > Reality is multicausal. Or perhaps there are no causes at all, and the laws of physics are deterministic and time reversible. Perhaps causes appear only in our models of predicting the world, because our models contain agents and counterfactuals which don’t exist in the laws of physics but are useful for predicting some phenomena.
  - MichaelBurge 5y ago
    Deterministic time-reversible things can still have causality. Just today I used gdb's reversible-debugging feature on a deterministic program to locate a bug. The existence of a bug implies causality in the program's execution state.
    - GavinMcG 5y ago
      Deterministic time-reversible things could still have causality in a universe that has causality. But that's not an effective response to the claim that there's no causality at all.
    - tshaddox 5y ago
      I suppose you could still talk about causes in a deterministic time-reversible system, but it doesn’t match the normal sense of the word “cause” given that future states determine past states just as much as past states determine future states.
- dav_Oz 5y ago
  Getting better and better at solving problems (here: in a broad range of mathematics) at an unconventional rate makes it uncanny. It seems like magic. As everyone doing magic tricks knows there is a lot of effort going into a good one. The "innate abilities" or "genius" is the "magic" we all like to experience. In the case of "von Neumann" he isn't isolated. He is often lumped together with other Hungarian Jews fleeing Nazism and refered to as A marslakók ("The Martians"): Erdős, Kármán, Pólya, Szilárd, Teller, Wigner ... Hungarians are a curious bunch, aren't they? Arguably the strongest female chess player of all time (in the same class as the strongest men) is also Hungarian: Judit Polgár. How do they do it? There is no magic, no genius, her Hungarian father wanted to prove exactly this to the (western) world (in the east the notion isn't prevalent). And he simply conducted the experiment[0] consequently his youngest daughter became a so-called chess genius. Or as a Korean or Chinese might say she is doing the hard work. We all like to tell ourselves stories and it is fine, it is a great and very effective way to convey certain things but sometimes we lose sight of what is really going on because of our infatuation with the narrative devices. Instead of learning and trying to explain things, we sometimes just want to indulge in the "magic moments". But as Feynman put it nicely: you can do both one doesn't exclude the other. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r
  - mjreacher 5y ago
    Wigner himself said the only genius amongst The Martians was von Neumann so he at least thought von Neumann was special compared to the others. For your example a mathematician who would fit better would be Norbert Wiener, who was taught from a young age by his father to be a prodigy.
    - dr_dshiv 5y ago
      Norbert Wiener! Love that guy. Cant wait for cybernetics to make a comeback. Gonna go look for cyber*.com names now…
  - kaba0 5y ago
    I don’t think it is far fetched to claim that such a complex system as the human brain has a genetic basis regarding intelligence as well, especially towards outliers of the IQ bell curve. For example, Ashkenazi Jews have very specific neurological diseases, but those same genes could also give much increased intelligence when they are paired with their normal counterparts. Here is a very interesting blog post on an investigation behind “The Martians” for example: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid... which basically finds this same reason for their “superhuman” intelligence.
mjreacher 5y ago
Unfortunately there has been lack of academic literature on this too on how he was able to solve problems so quickly. Much of what is known can only gathered from anecdotes from those who knew him personally. Edward Teller said in an interview that von Neumann enjoyed thinking more than anything else and did it all the time. This fits in well with other anecdotes. He was known to leave parties for periods of time to go to his room and write things down. He slept for only 4 hours a day and at night worked on problems. From what's been said of him he clearly spent basically his entire time thinking and working through problems. Then of course his favored way of attacking problems was axiomatically so he had some systematic way of going about this too. The end result of someone who spends a lot of time solving problems is that they know how to solve a lot of problems when they come up again.
- rustybolt 5y ago
  > slept for only 4 hours a day I've only really seen this mentioned in comments. All references I could find state that he often slept until late (for example, he liked to sleep until after 10AM). I would be wary of glorifying extremely short sleep patterns, they are unhealthy for 90% of the population.
- emerged 5y ago
  Well you basically just described me, but I’m no JvN.
  - mjreacher 5y ago
    Well if you can solve problems of functional analysis or linear programming while at a party with others I must congratulate you, you're probably half way there lol
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  > He slept for only 4 hours a day Edison as well. Interesting that. When I was a teen, I was introduced to a friend of my step-father's that had the same affliction — he slept only 3 or 4 hours a day. He had told me it was unusual. I don't know how unusual it is. If it is common enough then von Neumann and Edison having the same inclination is of no significance.
WEUJD883jjdAJ 5y ago
That story caught my eye and I had a different take. This is just my experience and anecdote should always be taken with caution, but here we are. I worked a little with someone, now deceased, who was maybe comparable to von Neumann in some ways as an academic or intellectual figure. Few in history are comparable to von Neumann really, but there are a lot of similarities in this person with reference to a different and narrower field. This person is cited in blog posts that show up on HN from time to time in disparate but related fields, and there's a similarity in a lot of respects at a smaller scale. My impression with that person was that they were smart, very smart, but not actually smarter than a lot of other people I knew and respected in academics. They had this sort of persona, almost like a role they were playing, with an an accompanying reputation that sort of got amplified and mythologized into legend. I have a lot to say about this, but at some point it became like an ignition process, where fame led to more citations and attention, which fed off itself. A lot of what they wrote or thought about wasn't really that different from their colleagues, who were more cautious or prudent or less extravagant. Their reputation got kind of turned into something outsized from reality. Stories like this with von Neumann (where "the question itself" or some important feature "go undescribed") kind of reminded me of my experiences in this regard. The details are fuzzy in these stories because they're exaggerated or obscure scrutiny, or are based on someone's subjective impression rather than the details. Call me jaded, but as my career progressed and I've worked with more people, I've become increasingly skeptical of claims to great minds or genius. It's a tricky subject because I wouldn't say there's no such thing as cognitive ability, but as claims become more extreme, there's usually a different explanation. It's the regression to the mean phenomenon. Usually they're just in the right millieu, with the right colleagues, and/or have a certain character they project, or something.

nabla9 5y ago

Reality is multicausal. Neumann could divide 8-digit numbers in his head when he was 8-years old. At age 8 he already mastered basic differential and integral calculus. Neuman was genius who studied math over several decades. I propose the following: (1) People like him are born, not created. They have innate abilities. (2) People like him still need to study.

tshaddox 5y ago
> Reality is multicausal. Or perhaps there are no causes at all, and the laws of physics are deterministic and time reversible. Perhaps causes appear only in our models of predicting the world, because our models contain agents and counterfactuals which don’t exist in the laws of physics but are useful for predicting some phenomena.
- MichaelBurge 5y ago
  Deterministic time-reversible things can still have causality. Just today I used gdb's reversible-debugging feature on a deterministic program to locate a bug. The existence of a bug implies causality in the program's execution state.
  - GavinMcG 5y ago
    Deterministic time-reversible things could still have causality in a universe that has causality. But that's not an effective response to the claim that there's no causality at all.
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    I suppose you could still talk about causes in a deterministic time-reversible system, but it doesn’t match the normal sense of the word “cause” given that future states determine past states just as much as past states determine future states.
dav_Oz 5y ago
Getting better and better at solving problems (here: in a broad range of mathematics) at an unconventional rate makes it uncanny. It seems like magic. As everyone doing magic tricks knows there is a lot of effort going into a good one. The "innate abilities" or "genius" is the "magic" we all like to experience. In the case of "von Neumann" he isn't isolated. He is often lumped together with other Hungarian Jews fleeing Nazism and refered to as A marslakók ("The Martians"): Erdős, Kármán, Pólya, Szilárd, Teller, Wigner ... Hungarians are a curious bunch, aren't they? Arguably the strongest female chess player of all time (in the same class as the strongest men) is also Hungarian: Judit Polgár. How do they do it? There is no magic, no genius, her Hungarian father wanted to prove exactly this to the (western) world (in the east the notion isn't prevalent). And he simply conducted the experiment[0] consequently his youngest daughter became a so-called chess genius. Or as a Korean or Chinese might say she is doing the hard work. We all like to tell ourselves stories and it is fine, it is a great and very effective way to convey certain things but sometimes we lose sight of what is really going on because of our infatuation with the narrative devices. Instead of learning and trying to explain things, we sometimes just want to indulge in the "magic moments". But as Feynman put it nicely: you can do both one doesn't exclude the other. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r
- mjreacher 5y ago
  Wigner himself said the only genius amongst The Martians was von Neumann so he at least thought von Neumann was special compared to the others. For your example a mathematician who would fit better would be Norbert Wiener, who was taught from a young age by his father to be a prodigy.
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    Norbert Wiener! Love that guy. Cant wait for cybernetics to make a comeback. Gonna go look for cyber*.com names now…
- kaba0 5y ago
  I don’t think it is far fetched to claim that such a complex system as the human brain has a genetic basis regarding intelligence as well, especially towards outliers of the IQ bell curve. For example, Ashkenazi Jews have very specific neurological diseases, but those same genes could also give much increased intelligence when they are paired with their normal counterparts. Here is a very interesting blog post on an investigation behind “The Martians” for example: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid... which basically finds this same reason for their “superhuman” intelligence.

mjreacher 5y ago

Unfortunately there has been lack of academic literature on this too on how he was able to solve problems so quickly. Much of what is known can only gathered from anecdotes from those who knew him personally. Edward Teller said in an interview that von Neumann enjoyed thinking more than anything else and did it all the time. This fits in well with other anecdotes. He was known to leave parties for periods of time to go to his room and write things down. He slept for only 4 hours a day and at night worked on problems. From what's been said of him he clearly spent basically his entire time thinking and working through problems. Then of course his favored way of attacking problems was axiomatically so he had some systematic way of going about this too. The end result of someone who spends a lot of time solving problems is that they know how to solve a lot of problems when they come up again.

rustybolt 5y ago
> slept for only 4 hours a day I've only really seen this mentioned in comments. All references I could find state that he often slept until late (for example, he liked to sleep until after 10AM). I would be wary of glorifying extremely short sleep patterns, they are unhealthy for 90% of the population.
emerged 5y ago
Well you basically just described me, but I’m no JvN.
- mjreacher 5y ago
  Well if you can solve problems of functional analysis or linear programming while at a party with others I must congratulate you, you're probably half way there lol
JKCalhoun 5y ago
> He slept for only 4 hours a day Edison as well. Interesting that. When I was a teen, I was introduced to a friend of my step-father's that had the same affliction — he slept only 3 or 4 hours a day. He had told me it was unusual. I don't know how unusual it is. If it is common enough then von Neumann and Edison having the same inclination is of no significance.

WEUJD883jjdAJ 5y ago

That story caught my eye and I had a different take. This is just my experience and anecdote should always be taken with caution, but here we are. I worked a little with someone, now deceased, who was maybe comparable to von Neumann in some ways as an academic or intellectual figure. Few in history are comparable to von Neumann really, but there are a lot of similarities in this person with reference to a different and narrower field. This person is cited in blog posts that show up on HN from time to time in disparate but related fields, and there's a similarity in a lot of respects at a smaller scale. My impression with that person was that they were smart, very smart, but not actually smarter than a lot of other people I knew and respected in academics. They had this sort of persona, almost like a role they were playing, with an an accompanying reputation that sort of got amplified and mythologized into legend. I have a lot to say about this, but at some point it became like an ignition process, where fame led to more citations and attention, which fed off itself. A lot of what they wrote or thought about wasn't really that different from their colleagues, who were more cautious or prudent or less extravagant. Their reputation got kind of turned into something outsized from reality. Stories like this with von Neumann (where "the question itself" or some important feature "go undescribed") kind of reminded me of my experiences in this regard. The details are fuzzy in these stories because they're exaggerated or obscure scrutiny, or are based on someone's subjective impression rather than the details. Call me jaded, but as my career progressed and I've worked with more people, I've become increasingly skeptical of claims to great minds or genius. It's a tricky subject because I wouldn't say there's no such thing as cognitive ability, but as claims become more extreme, there's usually a different explanation. It's the regression to the mean phenomenon. Usually they're just in the right millieu, with the right colleagues, and/or have a certain character they project, or something.