A Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting

I always recommend Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe[0] by George Dyson when John von Neumann comes up, it's a fabulous read.

[0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/44425/turings-cathe...

I recently read 'Maniac' by Benjamin Labatut, which also tracks the life of Johnny von Neumann. It is a wonderful read - very eloquently put together, giving accounts of the man from the perspectives of several people in his life.

Not only does it capture the alien-like genius of the protagonist, but also described his particular emotional and social character in a way that I have not seen written elsewhere. Highly recommended.

> Budapest around 1900 produced an absurd cluster of minds: von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Paul Erdős, Theodore von Kármán, George Pólya.

Not to mention Nikola Tesla about 20 years prior.

> When several of them turned up at Los Alamos and realized they had gone to high school together, Szilard joked that Hungary was a cover story for a Martian landing.

What if there actually are people who go to Mars in the future but regret it and the only way for them to come back to Earth is to invent a time machine and be reborn as a mathematical supergenius. That would explain this at least:

> At six, Janos (the OG hungarian name for Johnny) could divide eight-digit numbers in his head and hold a conversation in ancient Greek. He later added Latin, French, German, English, and Yiddish. The rumor was that he remembered everything he ever read. Many years later Herman Goldstine decided to test this by asking him to recite "A Tale of Two Cities." Von Neumann started on chapter one and had to be asked to stop fifteen minutes later.

I read The man From the Future a few years ago, and I highly recommend it! John von Neumann was such a fascinating and influential character. If you are interested in the modern history of mathematics, computers, game theory and more, pick up a copy.

I also wrote about why I liked the book so much:

https://henrikwarne.com/2024/07/07/john-von-neumann-the-man-...

Article spends the first 95% establishing JVN as a mythologically intelligent person. Then the last paragraph suggesting he would want to ban AI.

So much content out there atm nudging very hard for AI regulation.

> And most of the world is not zero-sum...

That is a strange thing to say, especially now.

Clearly, there is a reason Von Neumann spent so much time on this 'zero-sum' formulation of the problem, specifically in economics. Clearly he must have believed this was representative to a significant extent, especially given his interest in pragmatic problems.

It would make no sense for an intelligent person to work on an economics problem which doesn't model reality.

> Johnny remained a game theorist to the end. After a lifetime of culturally Jewish atheism, he asked to be baptized. His daughter attributed it to Pascal's Wager: a small probability of a much better afterlife, against a trivial cost.

The house always wins.