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It's odd that even today, different disciplines are still silo'd. My son started a research cross-database search engine because different disciplies use different terms for nearly identical concepts. Even within medicine it's silo'd.

Trouble with that startup was, the medical folks with money don't use computer tools. And the students in training have no money.

He's definitely the one guy from the 20th century I can't really reconcile his capability and breadth, other than being an alien or a time traveller.

Nash's game theory dissertation was something von Neumann considered obvious and not particularly noteworthy, if I remember my lore right. He was among the first game theorists, focusing more on collaborative games than pure strategic/competitive games.

Einstein built on the shoulders of Riemann, Gauss, and others when considering the universe might be non-Euclidean!

All brilliant people, many singular minds of great repute, yet, all improved by the rest.

Genuinely curious, because I know von Neumann was an intellectual giant, but what was his most original/groundbreaking contribution? My impression of his work has always been that he would survey a field, find some particular problem that needed attending to, tidily solve it, then move on to some other domain. But I guess there's a latent assumption there that he didn't do anything huge or groundbreaking.

Shannon may be gaining on him.

Definitely my favorite physicist for the same reason you state. The notion that he just went around different fields and said “here’s how math can improve things,” invented some new approach, and moved on to another field to do it all over again just cracks me up.

I had to frequently pause my read to research a discovery in more depth to understand the significance of it and I got a chuckle when he marries his childhood sweetheart because she got no mention prior to that point in the book.

"Turing's Cathedral" by George Dyson is also great. It's a kind of broad biography of all the great minds that started the computer age.

Hour long author's interview about the book https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_N1CZb4hel0

I read this last year and also recommend!

Books from before the age of AI will only become more precious over time. This is great.

He's my favourite mathematician too. Loved The Man from the Future book. Can we get a frontier model named after him perhaps? "Johnny" would be a great codename imo

You might not have "show dead" enabled in your settings. There is an antisemitic comment that was flagged and is now "dead" with a bunch of replies - so you would have seen those, and then now not see them if you don't have "show dead" enabled.

The best one is:

John von Neumann Shot Lightning from His Arse (2025) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45930838 (5 comments)

I know of several von Neumann like stories that people tell about me about things like instant memorization, fast calculation, and instant problem solving. There is almost always a trick that I didn't reveal to the person experiencing the miracle for the same reason a magician doesn't reveal their tricks: it's more fun for the person to figure it out on their own.

> He's also the inspiration for one of favorite characters in fiction, Sherkaner Underhill from A Deepness In The Sky.

Oh, hell-- that totally makes sense and I completely missed it until now. Thanks for mentioning that-- it adds some additional depth to a book and a character I already enjoy a ton.

Do you have inside info about that inspiration? At one point a human character monitoring from space thinks Underhill seems like several Dawn Age geniuses rolled into one and thinks he must be a figurehead for a collective (iirc). But that's a bit different from the author taking off mainly from him. vN isn't mainly known as a font of crazy ideas -- more like supremely fast & precise intellect.

Also for Doctor Strangelove.

I wouldn't be surprised if he's at least partially an inspiration for the Dr. Felix Hoenikker character in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle.

I liked the book, it uses an interesting storytelling mechanism of telling each chapter through the lens of a different historical character (his mom, his wife, friends, etc). But I think Labatut sacrificed voice and tone a little bit (there weren’t too many elements to differentiate between each narrator).

I enjoyed this one a lot.

For those who've read other books on von Neumann, do you think The MANIAC is a reasonable summary?

Could the controversy behind it be the reason that the author ommitted it? It was established terminology by 1973, as far as I can tell.

The conclusion is that von Neumann deserves the credit for the "von Neumann architecture", despite any contrary claims of Eckert or Mauchly.

Herman Goldstine, who distributed the document and John von Neumann, who wrote it, are the reason for the explosive growth of the computer industry during the following decades.

The paper written by von Neumann was an exemplary model of clarity and good logical thinking. Nothing ever written by Eckert or Mauchly was at a comparable level.

Everyone who read that paper understood immediately how to design and build an electronic automatic computer, and a great number of teams in many countries all over the world did precisely this, so a decade later there already existed experimental electronic computers in many countries and also commercial electronic computers in the UK and in USA.

Some of the details from the paper must have been learned by von Neumann from discussions with the ENIAC team, but others were obviously von Neumann's own ideas, e.g. the use for the main memory of an iconoscope tube with fast random access, i.e. a DRAM like today, instead of the slow serial delay lines chosen by Eckert and Mauchly for their following computers.

Whatever von Neumann has learned from the ENIAC team, he obviously understood better than the people who taught him, allowing him to formulate general principles for the organization of an automatic computer.

The publication of the von Neumann paper allowed the concurrent development of many computers in many places, and each of those projects found various improvements that were essential in making the electronic computers successful commercial products.

If Eckert and Mauchly had succeeded to block any competitors, then the evolution of computers might have been delayed by up to 2 decades, until any patents would have expired, because Eckert and Mauchly have never done later any significant innovations and they would have never succeeded to develop better computers at the pace that happened due to the von Neumann paper.

Moreover, Eckert and Mauchly had a history themselves of failing to mention their sources of inspiration, so they were not the people entitled to complain about someone "stealing" ideas from them.

Before ENIAC, the first electronic computer in USA was the Atanasoff-Berry computer. That computer was a special-purpose computer, designed for solving systems of linear algebraic equations. However, ENIAC was a special-purpose computer too, unlike the relay-based computers that were older than it, like the Harvard Mark I computer, as even its name implies (Numerical Integrator and Computer).

ENIAC was conceived as a replacement for the older mechanical "differential analyzers", which were used to solve ordinary differential equations, e.g. for computing artillery tables, so its architecture mimicked the architecture of the mechanical differential analyzers, and it was reconfigured for new problems in a similar manner with those, by rewiring.

John Vincent Atanasoff had written in 1940 a very high-quality document about the design of his computer: “Computing Machine for the Solution of Large Systems of Linear Algebraic Equations”. It is unknown if anyone of the ENIAC team had read it, but it is known that one of them had visited the designers of the Atanasoff-Berry computer, inquiring about the electronic circuits used by them to implement arithmetic operations and data storage. Later, during the design of ENIAC and after that, they never mentioned any connection with the earlier electronic computer.

He died from cancer - he was only in his 50's. Unlikely to be dementia.

How is this relevant?

Feymann shared these qualities too, but seems he would have been more interesting to meet - more of a normal, yet brilliantly smart, person, unlike Von Neumann who while being a bon vivant also seems to have been a bit "off" with his inability to drive safely, not remembering where the drinking glasses in his own house were, etc.

How else would you predict the weather? By observing a frog in a terrarium?

Because Paul Halmos was an exceptionally good writer. (I greatly enjoyed his "automathography" called "I want to be a mathematician", though it will probably appeal significantly less to people who aren't mathematicians themselves. See also his article "How to write mathematics" at https://www.math.toronto.edu/mgsa/assets/teaching-seminar/ho....)

The average Wikipedia contributor (even ignoring the possibility that they might be a robot) is not an exceptionally good writer, because very few people are exceptionally good writers, because that's what "exceptionally" means.

Agreed. This was an enjoyable read. I hope in this new era of lazy LLM vomit someone will take it as an example of what clear exposition looks like.

The PDF is an excerpt from a journal issue: The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 80, No. 4 (April 1973), pp. 382–394.

It's an article in a journal

That may very well be true, but none of those has published anything of comparable importance and quality as any of the many publications of von Neumann.

Whether some people have really superior intellects is completely irrelevant for the rest of the humans unless they distribute to the others some useful products of their intellect.

Von Neumann is one of the hundreds of people from the past who have left a priceless intellectual heritage to me and to the remainder of the mankind, so I am indebted and grateful to them.

I have no reason to feel any debt or gratitude to any of the employees of OpenAI or Anthropic.

Jane Street has published a few useful articles, so I have some gratitude towards them, but none of those was even remotely similar in importance to any page written by von Neumann.

bait

Kudos for posting such a good inflammatory comment.