The Man from the Future Quotes

“The truth was that von Neumann had been unhappy at the IAS for several years before his death. ‘Von Neumann, when I was there at Princeton, was under extreme pressure,’ says Benoît Mandelbrot, who had come to the IAS in 1953 at von Neumann’s invitation, ‘from mathematicians, who were despising him for no longer being a mathematician; by the physicists, who were despising him for never having been a real physicist; and by everybody for having brought to Princeton this collection of low-class individuals called “programmers”’. ‘Von Neumann,’ Mandelbrot continues, ‘was simply being shunned.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Did von Neumann understand the potential of the machines he helped to invent? Yes, he did. In reflective mood in 1955, he noted that the ‘over-all capacity’ of computers had ‘nearly doubled every year’ since 1945 and often implied in conversation that he expected that trend to continue. His observations prefigure ‘Moore’s law’, named after Intel’s cofounder Gordon Moore, who predicted in 1965 that the number of components on an integrated circuit would double every year.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“though the ENIAC had been designed by men, this gruelling, fiddly job of actually building it was almost exclusively the work of women, who laboured nights and weekends until it was complete.11 Buried in the project’s payroll records are the names of nearly fifty women and perhaps many more who were only listed by their initials.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Mathematics is the foundation of all exact knowledge of natural phenomena.’ David Hilbert, 1900”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Perhaps because of its near endless mindboggling implications, von Neumann regarded his automata work as the crowning achievement of his later years.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“For all its horror, pre-emptive nuclear war was a surprisingly popular idea in the higher echelons of power. Many in the US military were keen.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“What von Neumann disliked most about Nash’s approach, though, was the axioms upon which it was built. The idea that people might not work together for mutual benefit was anathema to him. He was central European to the core, his intellectual outlook shaped by a milieu where ideas were debated and shaped over coffee and wine.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Still Shapley humoured him, dazzled by the younger mathematician’s obvious brilliance. ‘Nash was spiteful, a child with a social IQ of 12, but Lloyd did appreciate talent,’ recalled Shapley’s roommate, economist Martin Shubik,”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Most people who have heard of John Nash know of him through Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind, which is unfortunate because the film romanticizes the man and somewhat mischaracterizes his work. The Nash portrayed in Sylvia Nasar’s biography, upon which the film is nominally based, is a petulant bully who advises his mistress of four years to give up their son for adoption.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Five years after Gödel’s breakthrough, a twenty-three-year-old Turing would attack Hilbert’s ‘decision problem’ (Entscheidungsproblem) in a way completely unanticipated by any other logician, conjuring up an imaginary machine to show that mathematics is not decidable. The formalisms of these two logicians would help von Neumann crystallize the structure of the modern computer. The result of his musings, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, would become the most influential document in the history of computing.16 ‘Today,’ says computer scientist Wolfgang Coy, ‘it is considered the birth certificate of modern computers.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“The ENIAC’s first job was not firing table calculations at all but hydrogen bomb problems from Los Alamos.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Von Neumann resigned from the NDRC in September 1942 to join the Navy. ‘Johnny preferred admirals to generals, because the generals drank iced water for lunch, while the admirals when ashore drank liquor,’ said Leslie Simon, a director of the BRL.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“formidable mental calculator even as a child.6 Some sources suggest that he could multiply two eight-digit numbers together in his head when he was six.7 These”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Einstein revolutionized our understanding of time, space and gravity. Gödel, while no celebrity, was equally revolutionary in the field of formal logic. But those who knew all three concluded that von Neumann had by far the sharpest intellect. His colleagues even joked that von Neumann”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Von Neumann proposed, in his way, two years later. ‘You and I could have a lot of fun together,’ he told her, ‘for instance, you like to drink wine and so do I.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“The best estimates of Trinity’s power put the figure somewhere between 20,000 and 22,000 tons. Oppenheimer reached for poetry, recalling a verse from ancient Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, which he had read in the original Sanskrit. ‘Now I am become Death,’ he said, ‘the destroyer of worlds.’ Bainbridge was pithier. ‘Now we are all sons of bitches,’ he told Oppenheimer.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“At one of his ‘high-proof, high-I.Q. parties’ one analyst produced a fat cylindrical ‘coin’ that was something of a RAND obsession at the time. Milled by the RAND machine shop at the behest of Williams, their proportions were carefully chosen so that the chances of falling heads, tails or on its side were equal. Without blinking an eye, von Neumann correctly stated the coin’s dimensions.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Von Neumann enjoyed driving very much but had never passed a test. At Mariette’s suggestion, he bribed a driving examiner. This did nothing to improve his driving. He sped along crowded roads as if they were many-body problems to be negotiated by calculating the best route through on the fly. He often failed, and an intersection in Princeton was soon christened ‘von Neumann corner’ on account of the many accidents he had there. Bored on open roads, he slowed down. When conversation faltered, he would sing; swaying and rocking the steering wheel from side to side with him. The couple would buy a new car every year, usually because von Neumann had totalled the previous one. His vehicle of choice was a Cadillac, ‘because’, he explained whenever anyone asked, ‘no one would sell me a tank’. Miraculously, he escaped largely unscathed from these smash-ups, often returning with the unlikeliest of explanations. ‘I was proceeding down the road,’ begins one fabulous excuse. ‘The trees on the right were passing me in orderly fashion at 60 miles an hour. Suddenly one of them stepped in my path. Boom!”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Von Neumann’s remarkable foresight is evident in letters he wrote to Ortvay between 1928 and 1939. ‘There will be a war in Europe in the next decade,’ he told the Hungarian physicist in 1935, further predicting that America would enter the war ‘if England is in trouble’. He feared that during that war, European Jews would suffer a genocide as the Armenians had under the Ottoman Empire. In 1940, he predicted that Britain would be able to hold a German invasion at bay (far from obvious at the time), and that America would join the war the following year (as it did after the bombing of Pearl Harbor).”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Russell’s paradox threatened to deal a far more serious blow to set theory than earlier ideological objections. The problem was this: consider a set of objects – all possible types of cheesecake, say. This set may include any number of different cheesecakes (New York cheesecake, German Käsekuchen, lemon ricotta, etc.) but, because a set is not literally a cheesecake, the set of all cheesecakes is not a member of itself. The set of all things that are not cheesecakes, on the other hand, is a member of itself.
But what, Russell wondered, about the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. If this is not a member of itself, then, by definition, it should be (because its members do not include itself). Conversely, if it is a member of itself, then it should not be (because it does). This was Russell’s paradox in a nutshell. His analysis of the paradox revealed it to be similar in form to several others, including the liar’s paradox (‘this statement is a lie’). ‘It seemed unworthy of a grown man to spend time on such trivialities,’ he complained, desperate for a solution, ‘but what was I to do?”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“[Euclid's] second postulate, for example, says that any line segment may be extended indefinitely. That is difficult for even the most querulous to argue with. The fifth, on the other hand, states that if two lines are drawn which intersect a third in such a way that the sum of the inner angles on one side (labelled a and b in the diagram below) is less than two right angles (i.e. 180°), then the two lines inevitably must intersect each other on that side if extended far enough. If, on the other hand, a and b do add up to 180°, the two lines never meet so are said to be parallel.
To mathematicians, that looks less like a postulate and more like a theorem in need of proving.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“The young von Neumann made an instant impact on his new tutors. His first mentor, Gábor Szego˝, who would later lead Stanford University’s maths department, was moved to tears after their first meeting.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“[Von Neumann's childhood home's] library’s centrepiece [was] the Allgemeine Geschichte, a massive history of the world edited by the German historian Wilhelm Oncken, which began in Ancient Egypt and concluded with a biography of Wilhelm I, the first German emperor, commissioned by the Kaiser himself. When von Neumann became embroiled in American politics after he emigrated, he would sometimes avoid arguments that were threatening to become too heated by citing (sometimes word for word) the outcome of some obscurely related affair in antiquity that he had read about in Oncken as a child.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Von Neumann had no interest in sport and, barring long walks (always in a business suit), he would avoid any form of vigorous physical exercise for the rest of his life. When his second wife, Klári, tried to persuade him to ski, he offered her a divorce. ‘If being married to a woman, no matter who she was, would mean he had to slide around on two pieces of wood on some slick mountainside,’ she explained, ‘he would definitely prefer to live alone and take his daily exercise, as he put it, “by getting in and out of a pleasantly warm bathtub”.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Jancsi was a formidable mental calculator even as a child. Some sources suggest that he could multiply two eight-digit numbers together in his head when he was six. These abilities, remarkable enough to astonish his early tutors, may have been partly inherited from his maternal grandfather. Though Jacob Kann had no formal education beyond secondary school, he could add or multiply numbers into the millions. Von Neumann would recall his twinkly-eyed grandfather’s mental gymnastics with pride when he was older, but he admitted he was never quite able to match them himself.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“The scientists and technicians working on America’s secret atom bomb project at Los Alamos during the 1940s called them the ‘Martians’. The joke was that with their strange accents and exceptional intellects, the Hungarians among them were from some other planet.
The Martians themselves differed on why one small country should churn out so many brilliant mathematicians and scientists. But there was one fact upon which they were all agreed. If they came from Mars, then one of their number came from another galaxy altogether. When the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and Martian Eugene Wigner was asked to give his thoughts on the ‘Hungarian phenomenon’, he replied there was no such thing. There was only one phenomenon that required any explanation. There was only one Johnny von Neumann.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Another frequent visitor to von Neumann’s bedside was Teller. ‘I have come to suspect,’ he said later, ‘that to most people thinking is painful. Some of us are addicted to thinking. Some of us find it a necessity. Johnny enjoyed it. I even have the suspicion that he enjoyed practically nothing else.’
‘When he was dying of cancer, his brain was affected,’ Teller recalled. ‘I think that he suffered from this loss more than I have seen any human to suffer in any other circumstances.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Terrified by the prospect of his own imminent death, von Neumann asked to see the hospital’s Catholic priest and returned to the faith he had ignored ever since his family had converted to it decades earlier in Budapest. ‘There probably is a God,’ he had once told his mother. ‘Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn’t.’
Nicholas could not bring himself to believe that his brother would ‘turn overnight into a devout Catholic’. The change worried von Neumann’s friends too. Ulam wrote to Strauss declaring himself ‘deeply perturbed about the religious angle as it developed’. Marina says her father was thinking of Pascal’s wager and had always believed that in the face of even a small possibility of suffering eternal damnation the only logical course is to be a believer before the end.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“I once asked him,’ says Marina, ‘when he knew he was dying, and was very upset, that “you contemplate with equanimity eliminating millions of people, yet you cannot deal with your own death.” And he said, “That’s entirely different.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“With his school years behind him, von Neumann took the train to Berlin with his father in September 1921 to begin the arduous programme of study that had been agreed. A passenger sharing their carriage, having learned a little about his interests, looked to engage the youngster in some friendly chit-chat: ‘I suppose you are coming to Berlin to learn mathematics.’ ‘No,’ von Neumann replied, ‘I already know mathematics. I am coming to learn chemistry.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann