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Klára Dán von Neumann
- paulpauper 2y agointeresting death. walked into the ocean?
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- BuzzVII 2y agoVirginia Woolf died in a similar way. The first two "A start is born" movies ended with ocean deaths. Then there is Moe's Swigmore University professor.
- gumby 2y agoAnd Harold Holt, PM of Australia.
- LarsDu88 2y agoWow I used to go surfing all over LA Jolla. Did not know someone so notable died this way. Feel like there should be a plaque or something on the beach in question
- otteromkram 2y agoWhat would the plaque say?
- moffkalast 2y ago"Beware of shark"
- theragra 2y agoNow I need to know why
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoShe was with John for a pretty long time, I wonder if she didn't want to live without him
- hnlmorg 2y agoShe did re-marry after Johns death. Tragically, her father also committed suicide. Mental health is not something that was as well respected back then as it is now.
- rjmill 2y ago> They were at a casino in Monte Carlo when Dán met her future husband, John von Neumann, for the first time. He explained that he had perfected a way to ensure that you could win roulette every time, and promptly lost all his money trying to prove his point. Magnificent. I can't explain why I'm so delighted by this, but the mental image makes me happy.
- roenxi 2y agoYou left out the next sentence, which was hilarious too: "Afterwards, he asked Dán to buy him a drink." She must have been instantly smitten, what a charmer.
- QuesnayJr 2y agoThis is the most hilarious "meet cute" I've ever read.
- vinnyvichy 2y agoThis implies that JvN was a gambler , but not a computer* (*) Okay, not a 1980s-level computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie )
- Sniffnoy 2y agoThis was an earlier husband of hers, not von Neumann.
- gumby 2y agoYes, the first husband was an inveterate gambler, but she did meet JvN in a casino too, with an absurd story.
- vinnyvichy 2y agoWe know him for his researches in games of chance (& skill), but here he definitely took his chances :) "Chess is not a game. Chess is computation." --JvN
- josefrichter 2y ago“For decades after this, society would devalue the work of programming, which ultimately allowed women to be a large part of the workforce.” – fascinating
- layer8 2y agoIt’s more that women already did a lot of human computing work, and programming was seen as being in the same league — which IMO isn’t actually that wrong, for the kind of mathematical batch programming this is about. If anything, maybe the human computing work was undervalued to start with.
- complaintdept 2y agoI had an elementary school teacher (decades ago now, and she was old then) bring in her programming material from when she was basically fresh out of college. I don't even think she was using punch cards*, it was weird...but every one of her coworkers was a woman because it was considered rote work for secretary types. * My memory is really fuzzy on this, but IIRC they had 1-2" holes in sheets that would either be transparent or black. Looking back they may have had some sort optical setup to read raw binary. I've never run into this since then (never really looked for it though either). She may have worked at IBM. I'd be interested if anyone knew what I was talking about.
- surfingdino 2y ago> Her family was wealthy, and often held parties where Dán would meet many different people from various stations in life. Family wealth is often ignored in various scientists' biographies. It makes it easier to do science without the pressures of having to think about where the next cheque is going to come from.
- tossandthrow 2y agoGenerally, a lot of the article has the feel of rewriting the past in order please a modern political discourse.
- 1f60c 2y agoI didn't really get that (I only skimmed the article). However, it uses a lot of flowery language, which doesn't seem very WP:NPOV.
- tossandthrow 2y agoThe character of the language you describe is indeed what gave me that exact feel.
- rottencupcakes 2y agoI don’t feel like what I read between the lines of her life and the tone of this article are terribly in line.
- MiguelX413 2y agoWhat discourse would that be?
- runlaszlorun 2y agoSame question here.
- jgalt212 2y ago
- mjreacher 2y agoI've seen her unpublished memoir, A Grasshopper in Very Tall Grass, quoted in quite a few places and it definitely seems worth publishing, such a shame no publisher has taken any interest in it yet.
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- johnloeber 2y agoAny idea how it was quoted without being published?
- mjreacher 2y agoMarina vN Whitman had the book in her possession so I suppose they visited her and got access to it that way. I emailed her back in 2022 about it and she said she was planning on sending it to Josh Levy at the Library of Congress to go with the von Neumann/Klara papers there but I don't know how that ended up going, perhaps the book might be there now. In a similar fashion Vincent Ford, who was the Air Force colonel responsible for von Neumann when he was in hospital dying of cancer, published a manuscript, Twenty-Four Minutes To Checkmate, on the US crash program for ICBMs focusing on the 1953-1957 period, which obviously overlaps a lot with when von Neumann was involved in those topics. It's held in the Dwight Eisenhower Library in Kansas however it's also only available if you visit in person. It would be a great boost to the history of science if both texts were either published or scanned and uploaded online to make them significantly more accessible to both scholars and interested laypersons.
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- mark_l_watson 2y agoMy Dad knew John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. My Dad liked him, saying von Neumann worked really late, played loud German music, and was eccentric. I wonder is Klara was as eccentric?
- drzzhan 2y agoWow. I wonder what its like to mest JvN in person. How eccentric would he be?
- dnlserrano 2y agogood book with some related anecdotes: The MANIAC
- 29athrowaway 2y agoMuch is said about John von Neumann but I had not yet heard about Klara. Thanks for sharing this. The technical report on the ENIAC is an awesome read.
- 2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago> She died in 1963 when she drove from her home in La Jolla to the beach and walked into the surf and drowned. The San Diego coroner's office listed her death as a suicide. now that's impressive.