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Thorstein Veblen, born in 1857, became an influential social theorist, best known for coining the phrase “conspicuous consumption” in his 1899 masterpiece The Theory of the Leisure
evolutionary economics,
The College of New Jersey had been renamed Princeton University
United States had entered the war, belatedly, only to ensure that the transnational interests of the industrialists would be protected against any social upheavals that peace in Europe might unleash.
airplane dropping bombs from his hands trying to see how this whole bombing thing would go.
Veblen arrived on January 4.
Since the time of Archimedes and his siege engines, military commanders had brought in the mathematicians when they needed help.
“the overwhelming majority of significant American mathematicians was to be found among those who had gone through the discipline of the Proving Ground. Thus
Göttingen, Berlin, Paris, and Cambridge were the centers of the mathematical world, while Harvard, Chicago, and Princeton were still far from catching up. Veblen returned to Princeton determined both to replicate
He set three immediate goals: to sponsor postdoctoral fellowships for promising young mathematicians, to free existing professors from crushing teaching loads, and to promote cross-fertilization between mathematics and other fields. “
commissioned him to compile a report on medical education, where standards were even worse. He visited some 155 medical schools, and his exposure of their deficiencies resulted in the closure of two-thirds of the medical
“Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott aber Boshaft ist Er nicht” (translated at the time as “God is clever, but not dishonest
By 1928, Bamberger’s department store occupied 1 million square feet, with 3,500 employees and over $32 million in annual sales.
Flexner argued that this “free society of scholars” should be governed by scholars and scientists, not administrators, and even “the term ‘organization’ should be banned.”19
thought to the possible financial profit of their work,” he wrote to the editors of Science in 1933, protesting against universities that were beginning to file for patents on their research.
strong
talent across mathematics was less subjective than in other fields. He deferred to Veblen as to candidates, explaining to the trustees that “mathematicians, like cows in the dark, all look alike to me.
Von Neumann, when hired in January of 1933, had just turned twenty-nine.
Over the next few years, Veblen drove a series of tough bargains with Depression-strapped landowners to extend the Institute’s holdings to a total of 610 acres,
professors referred to “the Institute for Advanced Salaries,
Flexner’s own tenure was short-lived. He started out determined to avoid “dull and increasingly frequent meetings of committees, groups, or the faculty itself. Once started, this tendency toward organization and formal consultation could never be stopped.
Whereas Flexner and Aydelotte had both been skilled teachers and educational administrators, but not scientists, Oppenheimer was both a first-rate scientist and a skilled administrator, as well as a connoisseur of history and art.
Benoît Mandelbrot, who arrived at von Neumann’s invitation in the fall of 1953 to begin a study of word frequency distributions (sampling the occurrence of probably, sex, and Africa) that would lead to the field known as fractals, notes that the Institute “had a clear purpose and a rather strange structure
The first kingdom was the realm of mathematical abstractions alone. The second kingdom was the domain of numbers applied, under the guidance of mathematicians, to the real world. In the third kingdom, the digital universe, numbers would assume a life of their own. FOUR Neumann J
Hungarians had been facing the impossible for eleven hundred years, with few resources except a strategic location that had been occupied by the Roman, Ottoman, Russian, Holy Roman, Habsburg, Napoleonic French,
In both mathematics and cinema it was said, “You don’t have to be Hungarian, but it helps.
This question led to his Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, written with Oskar Morgenstern during the war years,
constructing reliable computers from unreliable parts.
Von Neumann compensated for these superhuman abilities with an earthy sense of humor and tireless social life,
An ambitious previous attempt, by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, despite 1,984 pages extending across three volumes, still left fundamental questions unresolved. Von Neumann started fresh.
David Hilbert, who believed that from a strictly limited set of axioms, all mathematical truths could be reached by a sequence of well-defined logical steps.
so did Turing get his inspiration from Hilbert ?
Hilbert’s challenge, taken up by von Neumann, led directly both to Kurt Gödel’s results on the incompleteness of formal systems of 1931 and Alan Turing’s results on the existence of noncomputable functions (and universal computation) of 1936. Von Neumann set the stage for these two revolutions,
Turing proved that within any formal (or mechanical) system, not only are there functions that can be given a finite description yet cannot be computed by any finite machine in a finite amount of time, but there is no definite method to distinguish computable from noncomputable functions in advance.
He published twenty-five papers in the next three years, including a 1928 paper on the theory of games (with its minimax theorem proving the existence of good strategies,
Von Neumann did his best to undermine the Institute for Advanced Study’s reputation as a refuge where great minds retreated into quiet seclusion to think.
“Some of his best work was done in crowded railroad stations and airports, trains, planes, ships, hotel lobbies,
“but develop the worst traits of pedantism and inefficiency if I attempt to give a preliminary account of a subject which I do not have yet in what I can believe to be in its final form.
“Each day he would start writing before breakfast,
and on the train ride back to London, having witnessed the capabilities of a six-register National Cash Register Accounting Machine, von Neumann developed a short interpolation routine.
By “computers” von Neumann meant human computers, the kind that Oswald Veblen had assembled at the Proving Ground during World War I.
Richard Feynman, a graduate student (and amateur safecracker) from Princeton who was game for any unauthorized challenge, managed to uncrate the machines and get them to work.
“The trouble with computers is you play with them.” Feynman and Frankel,
And Von Neumann gave me an interesting idea; that you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of Von Neumann’s advice. It’s made me a very happy man ever since.
so essentially ENIAC was a thing after the Zecond world war. the second war was only aiding "computing people" with calculating assistance from IBM punch card machines
Statistician John Tukey (of Princeton University and Bell Laboratories) provided a direct link to Claude Shannon, whose mathematical theory of communication showed how a computer built from unreliable components could be made to function reliably from one cycle to the next.
breaking the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things.
The age of electronics began in 1906 with Lee De Forest’s invention of the vacuum tube,
lay shattered in the back of his car. “So you see pictures on the radio now? Sure
After failing to interest Westinghouse—then engaged in a bitter struggle against General Electric—in the commercialization of television, Zworykin transferred to RCA (successor to the American Marconi Company and progenitor of NBC),
In 1941, Zworykin was appointed director of RCA’s new research laboratories in Princeton,
