Stats for nerds
2recommend
6mentions
5people
2013–2022years
33% recommend67% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Yes definitely, but I feel that the mindset is to make a lasting contributions, something significant enough that it would remain important even one hundred years into the future. For example von Neumann had incredible respect for Kurt Gödel and said his incompleteness theorems were a "landmark in space and time", he wanted to make discoveries on that tier, and I am not sure he felt he did. Of course the way technology and computers panned out he ended up being more famous than basically any other mathematician for his role there, but obviously he couldn't have known that at the time. I would also add getting rid of bullshit jobs to the adjustments that you have listed as examples.
Most biographies of him strangely enough don't really go into too much detail on his work at the AEC, perhaps because there's already so much to talk about but also perhaps because a lot of this stuff was classified. It doesn't help either that the earliest biographies were only written more than 20 years after he died, and back in his lifetime in the first half of the 20th century not as much was written down as these days. I am assuming you are talking about his life in the 1940s and 1950s when you say "this portion of his life" so I'll give recommendations based off that. All the main biographies generally cover it but I'll give a few notes to help you make a decision. Not in any particular order.
- The Martian's Daughter: A Memoir
His daughter's autobiography, first part of the book talks about their relationship and given she was born in 1935 most of it covers the last parts of his life.
- John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death
This is the first biography by Heims; goes more into detail about their war work but I would point out though that Heims pretty clearly aims to denigrate von Neumann as a war hawk, none of the quotes are false or anything like that but when the book first came out several of von Neumann's colleagues criticized the book for trying to character assassinate him.
- The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann
Goldstine talks about the history of the computer but about two-thirds of the book covers work von Neumann and him both did together and there is plenty of biographical material on von Neumann. Obviously more focused on computers though.
- John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing
Unlike Goldstine's book this is a biography von Neumann, however unlike Goldstine Aspray didn't know von Neumann as a close collaborator. Like Goldstine's it also focuses more on computing, not as much Goldstine however a lot of von Neumann's automata work is tied up with computers so it's a good read regardless.
- Prisoner's Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb
This book focuses more on game theory with less biographical material on von Neumann, however it does have a dedicated chapter to his last years and what he was doing then.
- John von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, and Much More
This is probably the biggest biography, it is very even describing each stage of von Neumann's life. It is a bit more of a hero worship compared the other books which you'll notice if read the reviews of the book. Less technical compared to the others too.
- The World as a Mathematical Game: John Von Neumann and Twentieth Century Science
This one tries to evaluate von Neumann's contributions to 20th century science overall, as it was written in 2009 it does source to the previous books quite a bit. Shorter compared to the others.
- The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann
This one was only released this year, it's a biography but it kind of tries to describe the world around von Neumann at his time and how he fits into it. Obviously by now almost everyone who knew him personally aside from his daughter and a handful of others are dead so it focuses more on his technical contributions rather than anecdotes on his influence.
- Turing's Cathedral: the Origins of the Digital Universe
This one is also more focused on computing, has some things that aren't written in the others as Dyson did a particularly good job going through some of the archives, but not as much focused on von Neumann compared to the others.
- A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon
Isn't a biography of von Neumann but of Schriever, who worked with von Neumann to setup the first ICBM programs in the USA. Obviously the main focus here is on the military and political side of von Neumann's work in the 1940s and 50s, and not much else in terms of his life. However contains lots of information on this particular part of his life that other books lack.
If you look at the "Further Reading" section of his Wikipedia page there is a long list of books that feature him heavily in case you want more. Happy reading!
- The Martian's Daughter. A Memoir
not definitive but an interesting read from his daughter, quite an accomplished person in her own right.
- I feel like trying to extract a trend here might be overstating the case a bit. It is important to remember that many European intellectuals, such as Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, James Franck, Emilio Segrè, Maria Goeppert-Mayer etc, fled to the US due to the rise of fascism in Europe.
On the European side, it was one of the greatest acts of self-sabotage seen at a civilizational scale. At the American end, it was a boon. There were more Noble prize winners hanging around coffee machines than you could shake a stick at.
The analysis fails to account for this; for e.g. they weren't intelligent just because they were of jewish heritage. They fled because they were intelligent and jewish. And those who didn't flee were killed. Is it any wonder that a list of fleeing European geniuses that the US govt. allowed entry into the States is dominated by jewish geniuses?
Out of this list, the only anomaly that truly stands out, and is perhaps the reason why the term "The Martians" was coined is John von Neumann. Quoting from a prior comment,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25455028
It is difficult to overstate just how smart and well rounded von Neumann was. Most contemporary accounts are from the outside looking in, but his mind was truly extraordinary. He wasn't just a genius in one capacity, but he was a genius in every capacity. It is tempting to think of him as a savant, but he was far from it. He was social, brilliant, artistic, ethically considerate, and gifted in every sense of the word. His mind is the kind of mind that comes along only once in a millennia. And it becomes more and more obvious the closer you get to him.
One of the best memoirs I've read is that of Marina Whitman née von Neumann, his daughter. It is her memoir, with her memories and her extraordinary life and career. But her genesis was this extraordinary being. von Neumann doted on her. He loved her and tried to fulfil the whole of her extraordinary being and train her gifted mind. The result was a woman who became an extraordinarily perceptive economist who helped guide some of the economic policy of the United States. In a way, this wasn't unexpected, as she was, of course, von Neumann's bridge to the future.
I would like to avoid reducing her story to him, but she offers a unique, familial glimpse into his mind. The early parts of her book deal with her father, and talk about his extraordinary mind. It's genuinely hard to capture the true dimensions of his mental prowess. And it's harder to capture the fact that he knew it and he tried to do his best to live up to it. That's what's so special about von Neumann. He wasn't just the greatest mind of the past millennia in sheer intellectual throughput and ability; he was a mind willing to make sacrifices to leave the Earth better than he found it. As his daughter puts it,
> Were it not for his oft-repeated conviction that everyone—man or woman—had a moral obligation to make full use of her or his intellectual capacities, I might not have pushed myself to such a level of academic achievement or set my sights on a lifelong professional commitment at a time when society made it difficult for a woman to combine a career with family obligations.
and,
> But my father's intellectual appetite was by no means narrowly confined to mathematics, and his passion for learning lasted all his life. He was multilingual at an early age; and until his final days, he could quote from memory Goethe in German, Voltaire in French, and Thucydides in Greek. His knowledge of Byzantine history, acquired entirely through recreational reading, equaled that of many academic specialists. My mother used to say, only half jokingly, that one of the reasons she divorced him was his penchant for spending hours reading one of the tomes of an enormous German encyclopedia in the bathroom. Because his banker father felt that he needed to bolster his study of mathematics with more practical training, Johnny completed a degree in chemical engineering at the Eidgennossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, at the same time that he received a PhD in mathematics from the University of Budapest, both at age twenty-two.
He became cynical over time. She describes his deep pessimism of humanity; something compounded by The Bomb. But then again who hasn't become a pessimist with time? He still tried to fix humans and give them things that would help move them forward. And yes, I'm talking about him separately from the rest of humanity, because his mind was profoundly different from the rest of humanity. As the article quotes Hans Bethe's famous saying, "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man." He was The Martian.
I don't wish to spoil the book for those who'd like to read it, but the prologue is heart wrenching. He died far too young. I can't imagine what he might have transformed had he lived into his nineties and hundreds.
> The more important consideration, though, was national security. Given the top secret nature of my father's involvements, absolute privacy was essential when, in the early stages of his hospitalization, various top-ranking members of the military-industrial establishment sat at his bedside to pick his brain before it was too late. Vince Ford, an Air Force colonel who had been closely involved in the supersecret development of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), along with General Bernard Schriever and my father, was assigned as his full-time aide. Eight airmen, all with top secret clearance, rotated around the clock. Their job was both to attend to my father's everyday needs and, in the later stages of his illness, to assure that, affected by medication or the advancing cancer, he did not inadvertently blurt out military secrets.
And this, the saddest part,
> After only a few minutes, my father made what seemed to be a very peculiar and frightening request from a man who was widely regarded as one of the greatest—if not the greatest—mathematician of the twentieth century. He wanted me to give him two numbers, like seven and six or ten and three, and ask him to tell me their sum. For as long as I could remember, I had always known that my father's major source of self-regard, what he felt to be the very essence of his being, was his incredible mental capacity. In this late stage of his illness, he must have been aware that this capacity was deteriorating rapidly, and the panic that caused was worse than any physical pain. In demanding that I test him on these elementary sums, he was seeking reassurance that at least a small fragment of his intellectual powers remained.
> I could only choke out a couple of these pairs of numbers and then, without even registering his answers, fled the room in tears. Months earlier we had talked, with a candor rare for the time, about the fact that, at a shockingly young age and in the midst of an extraordinarily productive life, he was going to die. But that was still a father-daughter discussion, with him in the dominant role. This sudden, humiliating role reversal compounded both his pain and mine. After that, my father spoke very little or not at all, although the doctors couldn't offer any physical reason for his retreat into silence. My own explanation was that the sheer horror of experiencing the deterioration of his mental powers at the age of fifty-three was too much for him to bear. Added to this pain, I feared, was my apparent betrayal of his dreams for his only child, his link to the future which was being denied to him.
Whitman, Marina. The Martian's Daughter (p. 3). University of Michigan Press. Kindle Edition.
https://www.amazon.com/Martians-Daughter-Memoir-Marina-Whitm...
On a more shameless note, I'm compiling this as a part of my Project Karl. It's one of those books that I think everyone should know about and read, but few do. https://www.projectkarl.com
- It is difficult to overstate just how smart and well rounded von Neumann was. Most contemporary accounts are from the outside looking in, but his mind was truly extraordinary. He wasn't just a genius in one capacity, but he was a genius in every capacity. It is tempting to think of him as a savant, but he was far from it. He was social, brilliant, artistic, ethically considerate, and gifted in every sense of the word. His mind is the kind of mind that comes along only once in a millennia. And it becomes more and more obvious the closer you get to him.
One of the best memoirs I've read is that of Marina Whitman née von Neumann, his daughter. It is her memoir, with her memories and her extraordinary life and career. But her genesis was this extraordinary being. von Neumann doted on her. He loved her and tried to fulfil the whole of her extraordinary being and train her gifted mind. The result was a woman who became an extraordinarily perceptive economist who helped guide some of the economic policy of the United States. In a way, this wasn't unexpected, as she was, of course, von Neumann's bridge to the future.
I would like to avoid reducing her story to him, but she offers a unique, familial glimpse into his mind. The early parts of her book deal with her father, and talk about his extraordinary mind. It's genuinely hard to capture the true dimensions of his mental prowess. And it's harder to capture the fact that he knew it and he tried to do his best to live up to it. That's what's so special about von Neumann. He wasn't just the greatest mind of the past millennia in sheer intellectual throughput and ability; he was a mind willing to make sacrifices to leave the Earth better than he found it. As his daughter puts it,
> Were it not for his oft-repeated conviction that everyone—man or woman—had a moral obligation to make full use of her or his intellectual capacities, I might not have pushed myself to such a level of academic achievement or set my sights on a lifelong professional commitment at a time when society made it difficult for a woman to combine a career with family obligations.
and,
> But my father's intellectual appetite was by no means narrowly confined to mathematics, and his passion for learning lasted all his life. He was multilingual at an early age; and until his final days, he could quote from memory Goethe in German, Voltaire in French, and Thucydides in Greek. His knowledge of Byzantine history, acquired entirely through recreational reading, equaled that of many academic specialists. My mother used to say, only half jokingly, that one of the reasons she divorced him was his penchant for spending hours reading one of the tomes of an enormous German encyclopedia in the bathroom. Because his banker father felt that he needed to bolster his study of mathematics with more practical training, Johnny completed a degree in chemical engineering at the Eidgennossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, at the same time that he received a PhD in mathematics from the University of Budapest, both at age twenty-two.
He became cynical over time. She describes his deep pessimism of humanity; something compounded by The Bomb. But then again who hasn't become a pessimist with time? He still tried to fix humans and give them things that would help move them forward. And yes, I'm talking about him separately from the rest of humanity, because his mind was profoundly different from the rest of humanity. As the article quotes Hans Bethe's famous saying, "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man." He was The Martian.
I don't wish to spoil the book for those who'd like to read it, but the prologue is heart wrenching. He died far too young. I can't imagine what he might have transformed had he lived into his nineties and hundreds.
> The more important consideration, though, was national security. Given the top secret nature of my father's involvements, absolute privacy was essential when, in the early stages of his hospitalization, various top-ranking members of the military-industrial establishment sat at his bedside to pick his brain before it was too late. Vince Ford, an Air Force colonel who had been closely involved in the supersecret development of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), along with General Bernard Schriever and my father, was assigned as his full-time aide. Eight airmen, all with top secret clearance, rotated around the clock. Their job was both to attend to my father's everyday needs and, in the later stages of his illness, to assure that, affected by medication or the advancing cancer, he did not inadvertently blurt out military secrets.
And this, the saddest part,
> After only a few minutes, my father made what seemed to be a very peculiar and frightening request from a man who was widely regarded as one of the greatest—if not the greatest—mathematician of the twentieth century. He wanted me to give him two numbers, like seven and six or ten and three, and ask him to tell me their sum. For as long as I could remember, I had always known that my father's major source of self-regard, what he felt to be the very essence of his being, was his incredible mental capacity. In this late stage of his illness, he must have been aware that this capacity was deteriorating rapidly, and the panic that caused was worse than any physical pain. In demanding that I test him on these elementary sums, he was seeking reassurance that at least a small fragment of his intellectual powers remained.
> I could only choke out a couple of these pairs of numbers and then, without even registering his answers, fled the room in tears. Months earlier we had talked, with a candor rare for the time, about the fact that, at a shockingly young age and in the midst of an extraordinarily productive life, he was going to die. But that was still a father-daughter discussion, with him in the dominant role. This sudden, humiliating role reversal compounded both his pain and mine. After that, my father spoke very little or not at all, although the doctors couldn't offer any physical reason for his retreat into silence. My own explanation was that the sheer horror of experiencing the deterioration of his mental powers at the age of fifty-three was too much for him to bear. Added to this pain, I feared, was my apparent betrayal of his dreams for his only child, his link to the future which was being denied to him.
Whitman, Marina. The Martian's Daughter (p. 3). University of Michigan Press. Kindle Edition.
https://www.amazon.com/Martians-Daughter-Memoir-Marina-Whitm...
On a more shameless note, I'm compiling this as a part of my Project Karl. It's one of those books that I think everyone should know about and read, but few do. https://www.projectkarl.com
- Some of my favourite books or books currently on my wishlist (in no particular order). Many of these have been mentioned in other comments:
* Harry Potter series (thankfully I read this as a kid when I had more time)
* Thinking, Fast and Slow
* How to Win Friends and Influence People
* David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
* Self-Made Man: One Woman's Year Disguised as a Man
* The Martian: A Novel
* How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq
* Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets
* Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
* Outliers: The Story of Success
* The Rare Find: How Great Talent Stands Out
* The Martian's Daughter: A Memoir
* Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
* Ghost in the Wires: My Adventure as the World's Most Wanted Hacker
* The Better Angels of our Future
* Daemon
- His daughter wrote a memoir: Martian's Daughter: A Memoir http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009HBYAR2/
