alt Hacker NewsThe Legend of von Neumann [pdf]
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For a longer read, I can highly recommend the book "The Man from the Future" by Ananyo Bhattacharya. It's quite an easy read and extensively discusses the life and discoveries by John von Neumann in chronological order.
Not sure what just happened but like 10 comments just vanished. Anyway, here's a wiki link to "The Martians" which was a group of Hungarian scientists and Von Neuman was a member.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)
"The Martians" (Hungarian: "A marslakók") were a group of prominent scientists (mostly, but not exclusively, physicists and mathematicians) of Hungarian Jewish descent who emigrated from Europe to the United States in the early half of the 20th century.[1]
Leo Szilard jokingly suggested that Hungary was a front for aliens from Mars."
Von Nuemann is one of those names that when ever it comes up I sarcastically mentally note "John f***ing Neumann, AGAIN!". It's happened so many times in my studies that I think he might be the most important scientist to have ever lived.
He's also the inspiration for one of favorite characters in fiction, Sherkaner Underhill from A Deepness In The Sky*. :)
Feels appropriate to mention here recent HN mentions about who deserves credit for 'von Neumann architecture"
The end of life section is a bit whitewashed. Freeman Dyson had an article (struggling to find it) about how von Neumann was invited to give a Hilbert-style lecture on the 10 problems for the new computing age. All the big names at the time were there, but von Neumann was in such poor shape (dementia I assume), that it was decided to pretend it had never happened.
edit: article is called Birds and Frogs, by Freeman Dyson https://wucj.lab.westlake.edu.cn/Others/Dyson_Birds_and_Frog...
My favorite dude. Imagine one of the world's smartest people almost continually killing himself because he can't stop reading while driving.
This seems relevant to the current debate on the role of AI in mathematics:
What made von Neumann great? Was it the extraordinary rapidity with which he could understand and think and the unusual memory that retained everything he had once thought through? No. These qualities, however impressive they might have been, are ephemeral; they will have no more effect on the mathematics and the mathematicians of the future than the prowess of an athlete of a hundred years ago has on the sport of today.
"The duties of John von Neumann's assistant" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16411799
Anyone interested in von Newmann should read The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut
I don't know what ww4 will be fought with... But ww3 will be fought With mat4x4<f32> And 2.4 GHz
Authored by Paul Halmos. He wrote Finite-Dimensional Vector Spaces, which was assigned textbook for my Linear Algebra course. A humbling read for me, coming from calc 3 and thinking I was hot shit. Stripped me of any illusions of becoming a mathematician.
I remember reading about how he was also a pioneer in using early supercomputers to predict weather patterns in meteorology. I never thought to combine supercomputers and weather before.
Hungarian high school science fair projects...
for a chance to experience his mind, I recommend his book: "The computer and the brain".
OT: I found this style of writing extremely clear and readable. I wonder what is different about this author’s writing. There is zero pretension and just exists to impart information. But if that’s the case why do I hate the writing in Wikipedia?
He was good for the time, but Jane Street and Anthropic have hundreds of equivalent intellects working for them.
Fuck a von neumann machine bruv
I'm rawdogging wgsl In a bytecode VM
One type bruv:
alias Value = mat4x4<f32>; alias Buffer = array<Value, 256>; // // mental bruv
When you look at it holistically, von Neumann was more influential in science and mathematics in the 20th century than either Einstein or Planck. He wasn't as obvious a symbol of the scientific revolution, but his contributions to SO MANY THINGS at a fundamental level makes him stand out to me.