Idea Makers: Personal Perspectives on the Lives & Ideas of Some Notable People

by Stephen Wolfram

In the mid-1920s formalization was all the rage in mathematics, and quantum mechanics was all the rage in physics. And in 1927 von Neumann set out to bring these together—by axiomatizing quantum mechanics. A fair bit of the formalism that von Neumann built has become the standard framework for any mathematically oriented exposition of quantum mechanics. But I must say that I have always thought that it gave too much of an air of mathematical definiteness to ideas (particularly about quantum measurement) that in reality depend on all sorts of physical details. And indeed some of von Neumann’s specific axioms turned out to be too restrictive for ordinary quantum mechanics—obscuring for a number of years the phenomenon of entanglement, and later of criteria such as Bell’s inequalities.