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von Neumann was the genius's genius. Even the people a at Los Alamos had a suspicion that von Neumann operated on a different level from themselves. From wiki

von Neumann was the genius's genius. Even the people a at Los Alamos had a suspicion that von Neumann operated on a different level from themselves. From wikipedia: Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe said "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man".[29] Edward Teller observed "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."

TMWNN 3y ago
Unsurprisingly, von Neumann was one of The Martians. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)>
zero_k 3y ago
I am 100% with you. I have infinite admiration for von Neumann's talents. He was the genius of the geniuses. I wish I could have a 10 minute chat with him. He'd blow my mind, I'm sure. I'd love to explain some of the research issues I'm working on to him, I have a feeling he'd nail them to the ground. His resume is absolutely insane. The dude invented merge sort and it's an effin' side-note to his work. Like, WAT. His achievements could fill the resume of 50 Nobel Laureate scientists. Plus apparently he had a CHARACTER, like a real one. Would have loved to shoot the sh&t with him.
- satori99 3y ago
  There were others in his league who have been mostly lost in history. When von Neumann first published a description of a stored-program binary computing machine in 1945, he cited only one paper -- which was co-authored by Walter Pitts; https://nautil.us/the-man-who-tried-to-redeem-the-world-with-logic-235253/ https://nautil.us/the-man-who-tried-to-redeem-the-world-with...
  - cmehdy 3y ago
    Thank you for sharing this, beautiful and tragic as it is.
- pedrosorio 3y ago
  > The dude invented merge sort and it's an effin' side-note to his work. Like, WAT. Inventing merge sort is not a particularly impressive intellectual achievement.
  - dchftcs 3y ago
    It's trivial in an era where the concept of algorithms is established but less so back in the 1940s. You really had to be at the forefront to know that sorting algorithms are meaningful things to think about. But indeed mergesort is really not even a footnote of von Neuamnn's contributions to computing, which was perhaps not even 1/3 if his career. That's how much a giant he was.
    - 48864w6ui 3y ago
      Sorting was already a big thing in the punched card world. Edit: adp with cards had been a thing for half a century by the time digital machines appeared. IBM was founded in 1911; NCR 1884.
      - 082349872349872 3y ago
        The big advantage of electronic machines was speed. Early* digital computers didn't have much more memory than the card processors (64-128 bytes), but they weren't limited to cards/minute. For 150 cards/min, see http://www.righto.com/2017/11/identifying-early-ibm-computer-in.html http://www.righto.com/2017/11/identifying-early-ibm-computer... * EDIT: like ENIAC early. By MANIAC they already had ~5K of memory, which would've been unthinkable with the dieselpunk registers used by card machines: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-k0YcX-Qhvrw/WfxzfKNG1wI/AAAAAAABF6E/Q-DWOE7swbgauUIsySorRr0tCa-568E2ACHMYBhgL/w9999/counter.jpg https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-k0YcX-Qhvrw/WfxzfKNG1wI/A...
    - mkl 3y ago
      People have done merge sort, insertion sort, etc., by hand, for a very long time, probably centuries, and re-invented by many people. I would be very surprised if the steps had not been written down earlier. Algorithms done by hand, e.g. numerical methods, have been around for centuries too, so it's not that the concept was missing.
reddog 3y ago
von Neumann also advocated for an immediate, surprise U.S. nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union: “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?”. According to game theory you see, it was only rational. The genius's genius.
- viciousvoxel 3y ago
  It's a bit funny to imagine him as so sophomoric that he really thought this was the optimal game-theoretic strategy, which is true only in the most simplistic scenario.
  - jandrese 3y ago
    Reading that passage I’m not sure if he wasn’t just pointing out a danger of game theory simplifications leading people to absurd conclusions.
    - skrebbel 3y ago
      It’s well established that von Neumann wanted to kill millions of people (in the USSR), and would’ve done so had he been given the chance. That quote is not an isolated case. He was a genius with no respect for human life, he was so blindly opposed to totalitarianism of all kinds that he thought no amount of collateral damage would be too much.
      - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
        By the time of him writing this, totalitarianism killed 50 million people. After he wrote this, totalitarianism killed tens of millions more. Right now totalitarianism kills hundreds of thousands and is very likely on path to kill millions. So looks like he was on point with his math, again.
        matthewdgreen 3y ago
        I don't know when von Neumann gave this advice (he died in 1957), but estimates of the death toll from a nuclear war in the late 1950s ranged into the hundreds of millions, and that's only from the war itself and not the lives (and opportunities) lost in the aftermath. https://thebulletin.org/2023/01/cold-war-estimates-of-deaths-in-nuclear-conflict/ https://thebulletin.org/2023/01/cold-war-estimates-of-deaths...
Jach 3y ago
Relayed by Nick Metropolis: Fermi 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." That and a few other bits in http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/03/differences-are-enormous.html http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/03/differences-are-enormou...

TMWNN 3y ago

Unsurprisingly, von Neumann was one of The Martians. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)>

zero_k 3y ago

I am 100% with you. I have infinite admiration for von Neumann's talents. He was the genius of the geniuses. I wish I could have a 10 minute chat with him. He'd blow my mind, I'm sure. I'd love to explain some of the research issues I'm working on to him, I have a feeling he'd nail them to the ground. His resume is absolutely insane. The dude invented merge sort and it's an effin' side-note to his work. Like, WAT. His achievements could fill the resume of 50 Nobel Laureate scientists. Plus apparently he had a CHARACTER, like a real one. Would have loved to shoot the sh&t with him.

satori99 3y ago
There were others in his league who have been mostly lost in history. When von Neumann first published a description of a stored-program binary computing machine in 1945, he cited only one paper -- which was co-authored by Walter Pitts; https://nautil.us/the-man-who-tried-to-redeem-the-world-with-logic-235253/ https://nautil.us/the-man-who-tried-to-redeem-the-world-with...
- cmehdy 3y ago
  Thank you for sharing this, beautiful and tragic as it is.
pedrosorio 3y ago
> The dude invented merge sort and it's an effin' side-note to his work. Like, WAT. Inventing merge sort is not a particularly impressive intellectual achievement.
- dchftcs 3y ago
  It's trivial in an era where the concept of algorithms is established but less so back in the 1940s. You really had to be at the forefront to know that sorting algorithms are meaningful things to think about. But indeed mergesort is really not even a footnote of von Neuamnn's contributions to computing, which was perhaps not even 1/3 if his career. That's how much a giant he was.
  - 48864w6ui 3y ago
    Sorting was already a big thing in the punched card world. Edit: adp with cards had been a thing for half a century by the time digital machines appeared. IBM was founded in 1911; NCR 1884.
    - 082349872349872 3y ago
      The big advantage of electronic machines was speed. Early* digital computers didn't have much more memory than the card processors (64-128 bytes), but they weren't limited to cards/minute. For 150 cards/min, see http://www.righto.com/2017/11/identifying-early-ibm-computer-in.html http://www.righto.com/2017/11/identifying-early-ibm-computer... * EDIT: like ENIAC early. By MANIAC they already had ~5K of memory, which would've been unthinkable with the dieselpunk registers used by card machines: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-k0YcX-Qhvrw/WfxzfKNG1wI/AAAAAAABF6E/Q-DWOE7swbgauUIsySorRr0tCa-568E2ACHMYBhgL/w9999/counter.jpg https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-k0YcX-Qhvrw/WfxzfKNG1wI/A...
  - mkl 3y ago
    People have done merge sort, insertion sort, etc., by hand, for a very long time, probably centuries, and re-invented by many people. I would be very surprised if the steps had not been written down earlier. Algorithms done by hand, e.g. numerical methods, have been around for centuries too, so it's not that the concept was missing.

reddog 3y ago

von Neumann also advocated for an immediate, surprise U.S. nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union: “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?”. According to game theory you see, it was only rational. The genius's genius.

viciousvoxel 3y ago
It's a bit funny to imagine him as so sophomoric that he really thought this was the optimal game-theoretic strategy, which is true only in the most simplistic scenario.
- jandrese 3y ago
  Reading that passage I’m not sure if he wasn’t just pointing out a danger of game theory simplifications leading people to absurd conclusions.
  - skrebbel 3y ago
    It’s well established that von Neumann wanted to kill millions of people (in the USSR), and would’ve done so had he been given the chance. That quote is not an isolated case. He was a genius with no respect for human life, he was so blindly opposed to totalitarianism of all kinds that he thought no amount of collateral damage would be too much.
    - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
      By the time of him writing this, totalitarianism killed 50 million people. After he wrote this, totalitarianism killed tens of millions more. Right now totalitarianism kills hundreds of thousands and is very likely on path to kill millions. So looks like he was on point with his math, again.
      - matthewdgreen 3y ago
        I don't know when von Neumann gave this advice (he died in 1957), but estimates of the death toll from a nuclear war in the late 1950s ranged into the hundreds of millions, and that's only from the war itself and not the lives (and opportunities) lost in the aftermath. https://thebulletin.org/2023/01/cold-war-estimates-of-deaths-in-nuclear-conflict/ https://thebulletin.org/2023/01/cold-war-estimates-of-deaths...

Jach 3y ago

Relayed by Nick Metropolis: Fermi 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." That and a few other bits in http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/03/differences-are-enormous.html http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/03/differences-are-enormou...