John von Neumann

they have been realized for some time they have the kind of dynamics of the liquid core of the earth our very great importance that the state of motion of the liquid core of the earth is a very complicated motion where mechanically the only known recording of John von Neumann speaking on a scholarly subject turbulent we know we it seems extremely likely that this is responsible for the main phenomena of terrestrial magnetism and that it is also important for a number of other reasons the calculations are very difficult and can probably only be done in a three-dimensional sense and apparently a lot of these efforts we shall be made in this field have all tended to show how difficult it is and what extensive numerical problems arise it is quite typical that this type of problem again becomes probably accessible for the first time now [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] john von neumann 1932 1957 the quality and range of john von neumann's work earned him an undisputed place among the first rank of mathematicians in the 20th century his ultimate place in the history of mathematics and science can only be decided by time itself a colleague Paul Hellmers sums up the qualities of his mind in this way you could practically see Johnny imagine Johnny with a checklist before him as he was going down through various human disciplines mathematics physics chemistry economics his I've done that one I've done that one kept looking around for green fields to conquer I don't know if it was personal ambition or a tremendous intellectual curiosity he had that he was an amateur historian and an amateur this and that he loved to know about things but I think to some extent at least it was that he wanted to make his mark in everything he was driving to be a universalist and that's a very hard thing to be in the 20th century he came close while still in his 20s von Neumann had already solved Gilbert's fifth problem for compact groups prude the mean ergodic theorem provided a mathematical foundation for quantum theory proved the minimax theorem in theory of games and done basic work in foundations of mathematics later contributions include the classic treatise on game theory and such topics as rings of operators lattice theory shockwaves hydrodynamics astrophysics were their control atomic energy computer technology and theory of automata he was president of the American Mathematical Society served as top-level consultant to government and industry and as his prestige grew became the moving force behind key government decisions among many honors he received the first Enrico Fermi award and in 1956 shortly before his death the freedom medal stanislav Alam a close friend and colleague for many years remembers fun no man's personal qualities this way Johnnie's friends remember him in his characteristic poses standing before a blackboard or discussing problems at home somehow his gesture smile and the expression of his eyes always reflected the kind of thought or the nature of the problem under discussion he was a middle-sized quite slim as a very young man then increasingly corpulent moving about in small steps which consider a random acceleration but never with great speed as Maya flashed on his face whenever a problem exhibited features of a logical or mathematical paradox quite independent of his liking for abstract wit he had a strong appreciation or might say almost a hunger for the more earthly type of comedy in humor his conversations with friends on scientific subjects could last for hours there never was a lack of subjects even come on departed from mathematical topics Johnny had a livid interest in people and delighted in gossip one often healthy feeling within his memory he was making a collection of human peculiarities as if preparing a statistical study at the time of his death from Newman's peers considered him among the world's greatest living mathematicians yet he was virtually unknown to the general public a year-long search for film material turned up only these excerpts from a 1955 TV program youth wants to know in which all that the young participants knew about him was that he was an AE C commissioner and a very polite and patient man the only do you have a quick question there would be have been saying all these uh mechanical instruments and everything and what of how they educating more people to operate these instruments is there enough people to do it our literature I'm glad that you're asking this question because it's really a very good one no we don't take enough people didn't we better do something about it and I hesitate to say that we better do something about it quickly but rather we better do something about it both quickly and then continuously in other words we need more training in science on all levels in college in the high schools and more training of high school teachers all along the line we'll have to accelerate a great deal the old do you think you might get into that sort of field no I'm sort of interested in law a little bit he's from he's a lawyer from from Arkansas dr. San román here you're not going to be an intern do you think that more scholarships would help a whole lot yes no scholarships would be very important it will be very helpful but you must also remember that the scholarships he'll help you only at the end of this process and that before this you money it's very good training in secondary schools otherwise you may never discover that you have that ability also one needs more training of science teachers for higher poly high schools because otherwise the high schools never get to read foreigners to have faked a whole lot of things they might move over and take a look at a few other things and yeah for the moment we'll leave this general dynamics exhibit you over here to an exhibit we have here this is the electronics exhibit whereby as you see they have a number of gadgets I guess you might call them that or stop the wrong word no way you think it's an item this is what they tell me it's a scintillator now what do they do with that touch upon island well deed I think all counting instruments you switch you'll be turning the radiation level all count against Iran except this which seems to be just a carrying case what does that look like you could carry that around do you want to see if you can pick that up I think maybe you better leave it there wallpaper how many that that they tell me that that is encased with LED I believe it doesn't be and let's go over here now to a few other exhibits we have on this other side come on there girls come on Julia wanna hear Bill Jimmy Bob let's go over here to this side and we have we have a few other youngsters over here doctors let's watch that cable that's the fight we don't want to wind up with a broken leg you might come over here sir yeah well that's fine and you youngsters will over here in my left and right this another exhibit dr. Hartman when fun diamond was no older than these students not quite 18 he published his first paper Stanislav Lula comments on this early work in set theory and foundations of mathematics I think we can say really without any exaggeration that phenomena exemplified and typifies the spirit of mathematics in the 20th century in his early work it was set theory in foundations of mathematical logic which occupied him and the program which started with cantos creation of set theory then taken up and developed by hill map of XML file using mathematics all of mathematics and putting it on a firm steady and unique basis was really brought to completion in a sense or perfection by the wonderful technical achievements of dolphin moment still a very young man in the middle and late 20s for Norman wrote several papers in which are the axiomatic method as pertaining to all of mathematics was Putin a perhaps most technically sound and elegant basis Hilbert's program was of course assuming the belief which Hilbert himself stated explicitly there will be no ignorance and mathematics that all meaningful statements will ultimately be decided oh it was the discovery of girdle which came later in 1930 which changed or really shattered this belief from normal of course recognized immediately the importance of affirming importance of this point of view he was in fact a little bit disappointed that he himself did not see this other possibility bureaus result was that they will always be in sufficiently large mathematical systems statements which can neither be proved nor disproved within the system but this merely confirmed and stimulated Philemon in his work of making large parts of mathematics more constructive and more explicit John von Neumann was born in Budapest Hungary December 28 nineteen three Budapest at the turn of the century was an exceptionally fertile breeding ground for an entire generation of brilliant scientific minds Eugene Wigner Edward Teller Theodore von Karman Leo Szilard to name a few John von Neumann was perhaps the most brilliant star in this constellation von Neumann was the first of three sons in a wealthy Jewish family his father Max von Neumann was a banker a self-made man his mother Margaret Khan was a strong and dominant personality to whom from Norman was deeply attached despite the political ferment of the times Yan Chi as he was called led a childhood of sheltered opulence summers were spent with his many cousins in a country villa or on the Lido beach in Venice it was clear that he was a prodigy in mathematics from his early years at 17 when he graduated from the gymnasium he was already recognized as a professional mathematician nevertheless he decided to cover himself by studying Chemical Engineering in Zurich in 1925 he collected his degree from the University of Zurich and simultaneously a PhD in mathematics from the University of Budapest inevitably he was drawn to getting in we're under Hilbert he wrote his first paper on quantum mechanics he continued this work at the University of Berlin where in 1924 he became the youngest private isn't in the university's history several papers on the subject were co-authored with a schoolmate from gymnasium days in Budapest Nobel Prize winner Eugene Wigner I am a physicist and he was a mathematician and I can comment with any competence whatever only three Scott about his contributions to physics this way I could say of three kind two of these are indirect and welcome one type of contributions is direct first he contributed to physics by the mathematics that he created he created the theory of unbounded operators he contributed very greatly to the group to the theory of group representations in open space and to the theory of aquatic systems he writes encouragement of physics of concrete thinking on mathematics he always said that if mathematics is left to itself and has to develop out of itself it becomes barak and uninteresting and she's writing not only for physics but also for other branches of knowledge in particular economics was based on the circumstance the second type of contributions which he made to physics was made simply by being a mathematician in rested deeply in physics he convinced us that Rika was thinking creates distinctions not present in our usual more sloppy thinking of as physicists this this type of contribution was not as evident during Johnny's right time as it became since there is a large school now a very important school of theoretical physics the so-called school of axiomatic view theory which is based just on the fact that distinctions which were entirely neglected by physicists which are in a sense prevent two physicists were pointed out by him and are now coming into great importance and me forward the theory to a much greater extent and I am sure even Johnny anticipated his third the third type of contributions to physics which Norma made is a direct one he solved certain physical problems I don't mean principle with small physical problems but one very big one the statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics the understanding of what the quantum mechanical equations mean was achieved strangely enough a good deal after these equations became known and was known as mathematical entities he wrote a book about it first in German then it was translated into English and it is called the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics would like to tell you a few anecdotes to illustrate the unusual speed of yawn cheese thinking there was a puzzle in their twenties which became harder popular and it dealt with to basically cycling to add each other from the two ends of a forty mile track Swango is supposed to fly off from the one cyclist toward the other and meet other cyclists return to the first one then go back to the second one and cover a shorter and shorter distances a welter problem is what is the total distance of the swallow flight the speed of the bicyclist was 20 miles and the speed of the swallow is 50 miles per hour one can arrive at the solution of the problem not a quickly by noting that the two bicyclist will take just one hour to meet because I start at opposite ends of a 40 mile track and have a speed of 20 miles each during Kanoa naturally the swallow cries 50 miles because it's 50 miles per hour well few people see the solution of this puzzle and Johnny didn't see it either when Max Born himself a very well-known scientist a physicist totems a story in spite of this by the time that borin finished a story Johnny positive is the answer he said why 50 miles of course Bourne was astounded and he said he's asked the first one of my scientist friends who saw the solution at once Johnny said that I can't understand that it is a simple infinite geometrical series by the time Balan finished with the story evidently he had stamped up the lengths of infinitely many distances Traverse basis Volvo in 1930 sensing the disaster that was to overtake Europe he accepted an invitation from Princeton University and became a guest lecturer on mathematical physics that same year he married Mary at QVC and in 1935 Maryna was born the marriage terminated in divorce in 1938 during a summer visit to Budapest he met and married Clara Don and brought her back to Princeton glory fun Newman learned mathematics from her husband and years later became one of the first coders of mathematical problems for electronic computing machines when the Institute for Advanced Study was formed in 1933 von Neumann was appointed as one of the four original professors on its permanent faculty along with Feinstein Alexander and Valen in the early years the intense scientific atmosphere attracted some of the most brilliant mathematicians and physicists ever concentrated in a single place and time the phone Newman house was a gathering place for them in a round of memorable parties Herrmann file and his wife news for Marston & Louie's Morse from Boardman are teen and his wife Natasha Oswald Veblen James Alexander Bertrand Russell Harry smithe author Kessler and Oscar Morgenstern who remembers there was one evening party where Einstein appeared it was the only time I've ever seen Einstein wear a tuxedo but he didn't wear socks even then the parties at Johnny's house were a mixture of instant scientific discussion and then complete the relevance you went there with a light feeling every time because there was a spirit of freedom in that house and it was really wonderful whenever Johnny saw a funny hat he'd put them on he loved to be looked at and he would show off to the ladies he had one with a little contraption that made a noise when you blew into it and the light would flash at the same time it was one of those children's things and he loved it I never understood why it amused him so much but it certainly did in the late 1930s Von Neumanns work in pure mathematics reached its zenith with his investigations into measure operator and air Gothic theory Paul Hamas of the University of Michigan describes this work I first met Philemon in 1939 that was ten years after he'd already established his reputation as the leading scientist in operator theory in Hilbert space I went to the Institute for Advanced Study to work with him on their garlic theory and I was his assistant for a couple of years 1914 1941 in organic theory which has physical motivation there was an unsolved problem there gothic hypothesis which mathematicians and physicists have tried for years to express precisely and to prove and nothing happened till in the late 1920s early 1930 bo Koopmans of columbia we had a brilliant observation that that geometric physical subject can be expressed in terms of the language that selamat was an expert in in terms of operators here in Hilbert space and although I didn't know him then I can practically see Johnny just saying if it's operator theory I can do it and he did it what he did in its crudest and most physical expression can perhaps be described by sack of marbles say we have a hundred marbles like nine black and one white let me shake and as we shake it the white one rose in jiggles around if you keep our eye on any particular part of the sack of marbles see the bottom third we see the white one going in there and going out bouncing back and forth and we expect that on the average it sent a third of its life in the bottom third of the sack in the same way to take a continous example suppose we have a cup of black coffee and a drop of cream floating on top if we gently stir the mixture there's some black still on the bottom some white still on top but it begins gradually to spread through and as the stirring goes on it assumes a homogeneous dark brown color Koopmans observation amounts to this that stirring the permutation of the sack of marbles can be described by a matrix with a hundred rolls and a hundred columns and the property that in each shown in each column there is exactly one one all the rest being zeros if such a matrix is M then the averaging property of the shaking of the sack of marbles is described by forming the average M plus M square plus and so on up to M to the N over N and the assertion about the marble spending a third of its life in the bottom third becomes a theorem about the limit of the sequence of averages and in the same way the coffee example can be studied in terms of a unitary operator you the appropriate generalization of a matrix and an infinite-dimensional instead of a hundred dimensional hilbert space and the uniform brownness of the cup of coffee is a property of the average u plus u square plus u to the n over n and the limit of that as n becomes infinite the precise formulation and proof of this result which is known as the mean ergodic theorem is for no one's accomplishment in this direction shortly thereafter inspired by it Gidi Birkhoff presented a different version and the subject has been extensively studied and investigated since then here in the broad and the Soviet Union and elsewhere for Lyman used operator theory to study spectral theory to study a gothic theory and he used a gothic theory as the motivation for and is the construction of basic examples in operator theory he used operator theory also in his physical studies of quantum mechanics when he was thinking about quantum mechanics he could think that the physicists can be sloppy with the best of them when he was thinking of operator theory and in particular his special invention rings of operators he could be as precise and careful and algebraic as the best rings of operators by the way have come to be known as some Lyman algebras one of the most startling and original contributions for Lyman maid comes from the theory of rings of operators if we study a finite dimensional say a hundred dimensional Euclidean space then to say that the subspace of it is 50 dimensional it's just as well described by saying that it has half the dimension of the whole space and to say that it is 75 dimensional is the same as to say it occupies three-quarters of the dimension of the space so the dimensions may be described by percentages say running between 0 100 100 100 in connection with various rings of operators phenomena troost dimension functions in continuous geometries where the dimensions could take any value between 0 & 1 so it makes sense to speak of a subspace of dimension 1 over pi people often want to know what made for line 1 so great what made it possible for him to make so many contributions in so many different parts of mathematics I don't know it is enough to say that he worked hard he worked very hard there is a sort of it said running through for Lyman's work it's hard to say what it is but essentially it was his genius at synthesizing and analyzing things he could take large units reams of operators measures continuous geometries direct integrals and express the unit in terms of infinitesimal little bits and vice-versa it could take infinitesimal bits and put together glue together by means of them large units with arbitrary prescribed properties that's what a lot of modern mathematics is about that's what Johnny could do and what no one else could do as well Oscar Morgenstern economist Princeton University I went to Princeton in 1938 partly because phenomen was there and I was acquainted with some of his work particularly his paper of 1928 on game theory which had unto them be quite neatly neglected I was quite convinced of its importance for the social sciences because it proved that important may max theorem and so I decided to draft a paper and showed it to phenomen and he said it was too short it should be expanded I did that he looked at it again he said fine why don't we write a joint paper and so we started and out of this joint paper came in a period of the most intensive work I've ever known the book which we finally published in 1944 we used to meet at the Nassau Club virtually every morning his wife liked to sleep alone and I was unmarried then and had my breakfast there and he would join me we continued to meet there even long after the book had come out it was a wonderful way to start the day always full of discussions about the events of the day many scientific matters came up and it was a wonderful never gotten period he loved the wide-open spaces so we often went to secret not to swim because he didn't like that kind of exercise but took work along the beach we had very serious discussions and these walks sort of crystallized them then we would go home and write down things that was a normal way of working the sort of walking in the open air seems to help mental activity he wasn't a man who sat and studied hurt he would think all the time and when it was ready in his mind it came rushing up he worked with tremendous energy and fantastic speed I've seen him write 30 pages in one day he worked almost anywhere any hotel room train wherever he was the remarkable think about my association with phenomenas perhaps that he as a mathematician could so quickly and easily penetrate into the problems of economics and sociology which I present it to him that is very indicative of his basic philosophy which was that mathematics should try to enter new areas new fields not only be inspired as it had been by the Natural Sciences he expected that it would receive great stimulus from the other areas and I'm sure that if he had lived he would have made great contributions also for example to biology into in which field he was very much interested but out of this study of sociology and economics on the one side and mathematics on the other came this book which is the fruit of our joint association the theory of games was a landmark work in pointing the way toward the mathematize ation of human motivations the theory deals with problems ranging from the two-person game in which the goals of individuals are diametrically opposed as in poker and war to Empress and games involving complex interaction of groups and finally to insights into individual choice as it is expressed in economics in 1943 von Neumann was one of those who disappeared into the West to work on the Manhattan Project Los Alamos at that time was a unique mixture of primitive living conditions super secrecy and brilliant scientific minds all of which combined to create an atmosphere of intense excitement and stimulation von Neumann took part in most of the crucial stages of the bombs development and was present at the detonation of the first a bomb at the Trinity site Nobel prize-winner Hans bethe leader of the theoretical physics division in Los Alamos 1943 to 1946 in Los Alamos in 1943 we had the problem of assembling uranium to make an atomic bomb dr. von Neumann was a consultant to the laboratory and visited us about three times a year for a week or two at a time there were two methods being considered one was to shoot the parts of the bomb together by a gun and the other method was the so-called implosion in which you surround the bomb material by high explosive and then explode this material this explosive so that the matter of the bomb would assemble in the sphere in the beginning of the way Los Alamos laboratory only the first method seemed to be possible it was one Norman who told us and encouraged us to try the second and who gave us a lot of information on similar work which had been done under his supervision at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland in which shaped charges had been developed he was very positive that an implosion could be developed and he told us that this would have added advantages for the assembly which we had not realized one of the advantages which we had realized was that the implosion would bring the matures together much faster and therefore would prevail detonation of the weapon before full assembly another advantage which he pointed out was that the implosion might squeeze the material and might thereby increase the efficiency of the weapon even after his encouragement however we still found it very difficult to assemble the material by implosion there were experiments made under the leadership of dr. Castilla coffee of Harvard to study the explosive method without the uranium being around and unfortunately they gave all sorts of irregular shapes well this did not trouble one Norman at all he suggested to us that we use something to focus the implosion focus in a similar way as light is focused by a lens and this device in fact has been called an explosive lens afterwards he designed for us some configuration of explosive lenses which actually worked and which was finally used in the assembly that we used for the first bomb in Trinity and afterwards in Nagasaki fun Norman loved Los Alamos the spectacular scenery the Magnificent climate and the many friendships drew him back again and again he would go along with friends on anything from a mule trip into the mountains to a set of tennis with stand alone but always in his Oxford grey business suit during the period he was working in Los Alamos von Neumann became intensely interested in computers dr. Herman goldstine now the IBM corporation was one of his earliest collaborators this work in a spring of 1966 dr. Goldstein was invited to visit a warehouse of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington where the original Princeton computer is stored he was accompanied by dr. Goethe murtabak of a Smithsonian staff these things would have fascinated Johnny he used to love toys when he worked on the on his automata theory at the beginnings he started since he had to make three-dimensional objects he brought little biggest tinker toys said that he could find and he made the objects out of these until somebody we showed him one time how to make these two dimensionally so he was able to give the tinker toys to Morgenstern's son well as Johnny would have said merci here it is all these years may I move the cutting sure the glad to let's see what it looks like if I can do it very good I succeeded yes all right thank you this machine was the concrete embodiment of the new minds very great ideas and contributions which he is made to the electronic computer field in 1946 Johnny asked me if I would join him at the end of the war in Princeton and help him to carry out in concrete form the ideas which he had been working on in 1944 in 1945 of course I jumped at the chance we rushed to Princeton and got started the machine that eventuated from that is the one you see here and it contains essentially those things which the modern computer has in it although in somewhat primitive form this machine has stored program concept as its major feature and that in fact is the thing which makes the modern computer revolution possible the older machines required one to clumsily perform hand plugging zuv connections which took hours indeed days it meant that programming was an art in fact a very black art and furthermore it meant that the total number of instructions one could write were comparatively small this new concept has been carried so far today that programs are written involving tens of millions of instructions whereas in those days of course nobody dreamed of such complexity but Johnnie's idea made this basically possible what is the stored program concept well it's the notion that you can describe in a finite number of words in fact a fairly small number of words in a fairly simple language exactly and unequivocally the description of a problem and that this description is then translated into binary digits and stored in the memory of the computer exactly as numbers are stored this was the discovery by Johnny you may say what's so remarkable about that well the only thing I can tell you an answer to that is it's just like the wheel what's so remarkable about the wheel when you look at it you can't conceive how anybody would not have known that there was one indeed it must have been that the moment somebody mentioned the wheel or somebody mentioned the stored-program everybody around us obviously knew that this was the way to do it and in fact we accepted it immediately it was not one of these inventions or discoveries which is enormous ly complicated and few people can understand it's tremendously simple it immediately hit hits a person and he knows that's it now this I believe was his great discovery and curiously enough it relates back in a very interesting way to his very early mathematical works which were in the domain of formal logics he however had other interests and I think his second great contribution to the computing field lay in his work at Los Alamos in showing the experimental people there how it was possible by mathematical modeling to formulate the problems which with which they were grappling in mathematical form indeed in systems of partial differential equations which Express the conservation laws of hydrodynamics and then to translate those complicated implicit equations into explicit finite systems of difference equations and these systems of difference equations then can be solved on the computer and indeed this is the reason why initially he had this great interest in the computer but you see it led him to develop many of the things in numerical analysis that we know today now the third thing really which he did for the field was to bring his great prestige to the subject to make the notion of computation stylish if you will he showed people that it's necessary to do tedious experimentation that it's possible much more conveniently to do experiments if you will on the computer by numerical techniques I think in part he did this because he was very much of the computer himself he had great facility of numerical processes and in fact I can tell you an anecdote which I think may interest you some it happened down at Aberdeen early on during the war and what he was doing then was consulting frequently at Aberdeen coming on up to Philadelphia to to talk with us about the ENIAC now this particular day in fact the day prior to this one a young mathematician who subsequently has become a famous person had come in with several colleagues and we were talking about a problem with which he was grappling and he was getting nowhere and asked our help well none of us was able to do anything with it analytically so he said well the heck with it I'm gonna take a computer or Friedan or Marchand Herman row home tonight and I'm gonna calculate a few special cases and fine he did and the next morning he came in at 5:30 looking awful he had bags under his eyes he was fatigued he was unshaved he was in fact in very bad way but he had triumphed he had calculated the first five cases and he was busy telling us about this when who should bust in but Johnny from Los Alamos and he said well what's new fellows and we said all well so-and-so has been busy with the following idea and he's in trouble with it and he said well let's see what it's like and he tried for a couple of minutes and he said no he said that's sort of intractable analytically let me see what's doing with this thing numerically let me evaluate a few cases so he did in about one minute he threw his head back and he said and you could hear the numbers rolling through his his his head you could actually hear them he was mumbling them and in about a minute he did the first case and maybe a minute and a quarter the second in a minute and a half the third and two minutes the fourth and he came then to the crucial case the one which this fellow had spent his whole night working out and this chap was very clever it and he listened closely to phenom on as he was rolling through N equals five and when he judged he was about halfway through he recognized a number and he waited an instant and then he said twenty six point seventy five and you could just see for noah and kind of come to a shuddering halt and he said huh and this boy said twenty-six point seventy five professor Foner mine and phenomenon said just a minute and he got very nervous and he began to compute again and you could hear the tempo going up much more than it had before and after another minute he said 26 point seventy five yes he says that's right and the whereupon this fellow ran out of the room because he couldn't stand it any longer and I made childish chatter trying to keep Venoy mind distracted while he paced up and down nervously saying to himself how could that guy have possibly done that what trick and after an hour so we finally told him but any rate that's sufficient to illustrate his great ability as a computer himself and the great feeling he had for computation no this whole field owes so much to for no man's genius that it's really very difficult to tell you exactly what would have happened if this hadn't been built I can only say that his stored program concept might not ever have been discovered by another person or it might have taken many years before it was discovered and almost as important as that perhaps not from a mathematicians point of view but from a economic point of view his great prestige as a mathematician sold the notion of the computer and it's great importance to the industrialists and to the government officials who made this whole development possible the immense strides in computer technology that were spurred by fond Norman's work had as one result the speeding up of the development of the h-bomb the reputation that von Newman earned for his work during this period drew him more and more into contact with industry and government by the early 1950s he was devoting nearly all of his time as a high-level consultant to various governmental agencies some of his friends felt he spread himself too thin I wish he had been more economical with his time in that respect for example if people called him to Washington or elsewhere he would very readily go and so understand having these people come to him it was much more important that I think that he should have saved his time and and effort that he felt when the government called that he won had to go it was a patriotic duty and as I said before he was a very devoted citizen of the country here and I think one of the things that particularly pleased him was any recognition which came sort of from the government in fact he in that sense I felt that sometimes somewhat peculiar that he would well it's easy to be impressed by government officials or journals and so on if a big uniform appeared that made more of an impression than sure they've done yes it was odd but it shows that it was a person of very many disguises and sometimes self-contradictory facets I think in October 1954 John von Neumann was appointed as a member of the Atomic Energy Commission but only a few months later he was hospitalized with the cancer that was to end his life Admiral Lewis straws chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission during that period I remember one particular incident at Walter Reed Hospital the Army Hospital here in Washington when the Defense Department felt that it had to consult him he was their chief scientific adviser on air force matters and I recall the extraordinary picture of sitting beside the bed of this man in his 40s who had been an immigrant and they are surrounding him where the Secretary of Defense the Deputy Secretary of Defense the secretaries of Air Army Navy and the Chiefs of Staff despite the pressures of his involvement in governmental work from NOAA in his last year's struck out boldly into the almost unexplored field of automata his interest in this field first led him to consider the possibility of constructing reliable machines that would utilize unreliable components he reasoned that if the human brain could continue to function well even after some degree of damage that a large and complex machine might be made to do the same this is in sharp contrast to present-day computing machines in which failure of a single component may lead the machine to produce results that are complete gibberish but perhaps his most daring work in automata was his attempt to develop a machine not only capable of reproducing itself but of an evolutionary process in which succeeding generations construct machines of increasing complexity in his last work the computer and the brain for Norman suggested that logic and mathematics in the central nervous system when viewed as languages must be structurally essentially different from any of the languages in our experience it is ironic that though his work in automata was left incomplete the enormous possibilities that it opened up may yet prove to be his most significant contribution to science Philemon was many things he was a mathematician he was a physicist a chemist and economist the human being of course and he tried to be more now my point of view is prejudiced I wanted him to be nothing but a mathematician and in what I call mathematics pure mathematics as distinguished from its physical applications in that work he stopped functioning by the early or middle 1940s and I don't think it was the war that had anything to do with it or his subsequent illness his interests changed so I don't think if he'd lived longer he would have accomplished more along the lines of pure mathematics but I think he could have if he'd wanted to if he devoted all of his all of the long life to mathematics he might have had a place with two all-time greats of mathematics as it is I sometimes think that though he was tremendous while he was alive and well he had a very important effect on the mathematics of this century somehow two or three centuries from now he will have become a relatively minor figure he did not I think fulfill himself in the sense of using the talent that he had to its fullest he's spreaded thinner than some people to get too much of it perhaps and that made for a peculiar wastage some people felt that what he did was to cast about randomly looking for new directions to move but he really was not going in random directions at all he was really seeking to see in which areas the tools of mathematics which he had at his command could be brought to bear to change some subject fundamentally from a non mathematical to a mathematical one I think it's fair to summarize his contributions by saying that what he did were very very difficult things they were very profound and that they inevitably altered not only his own mathematical career but that of mathematics itself Edward Teller friend and colleague many people have wondered how Jonathan Island could think so fast and so effectively how he could find so many original solutions in areas where most people did not even notice the problems I think I know a part of the answer perhaps an important part johnny phenomen enjoyed thinking I have come to suspect that to most people thinking is painful some of us are addicted to thinking some find it a necessity Johnny enjoyed it I even have suspicions that he enjoyed practically nothing else this explains a lot because what you like you do well and he liked thinking not just in mathematics he liked thinking in the clear and complete manner of mathematicians in every field in mathematics in physics in the business world is far about a banker in many other fields he could and did talk to my three-year-old son on his own terms and I sometimes wondered whether his relation to the rest of us were a little bit similar this also explains his effectiveness in connection with computing machines because computing machines apply logical processes to field not only mathematics but to others as yet untouched by the logical process and it is very significant that this revolution the revolution of the electronic brains was practically initiated by Johnny for nine I cannot think of Johnny now without remembering a very tragic circumstance when he was dying of cancer his brain was affected I visited him frequently and he was dying to do what he always tried to do and he was trying to argue with me as he used and it wasn't functioning anymore and I think that he suffered from this loss more than I have seen any human to suffer in any other circumstance [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]

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Keywords:

Id: Y2jiQXI6nrE

Length: 59min 33sec (3573 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 13 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/dasWurmloch]

I am terrified of being as terrified as him at the end.

[u/sunnynihilist]

Agree!

[u/epikmemerXD]

I don't really understand what they say can someone explain?