Comment by srejk
8 hours ago
When you look at it holistically, von Neumann was more influential in science and mathematics in the 20th century than either Einstein or Planck. He wasn't as obvious a symbol of the scientific revolution, but his contributions to SO MANY THINGS at a fundamental level makes him stand out to me.
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.
It's crazy that we talk about LLMs, AI/ML and what not but so many fields still don't use computation as much as we think they do simply because they cannot reliably keep up with the advancements happening almost everyday and people simply forgetting about backwards compatibility in their products
A researcher submitted a paper to the medical journal _Diabetes care_ in the nineties that basically redescribed integral calculus as a novel finding. How’s that for a silo?
For anyone else who is curious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai%27s_model
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8137688/
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Is your son’s search engine somewhere available, please?
It was something like 'Rugobi'. I'll ask him if there's a demo still up.
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I always say knowledge is like a sweater. Pull a thread and the whole thing unravels. Everything is connected so if you start somewhere and never stop learning you'll end up in every discipline. There's also a good old Weezer song called Undone for this.
My minor required me to take Electricity & Magnetism from the physics department the same semester I had to take Fields & Waves from the electrical engineering department.
Yes, they were identical.
My crib note that I took into the later final exam was simply a conversion between terms in the two departments. Nothing else; I'd already crammed and aced the first exam.
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.
Saying that von Neumann was one of the first game theorists undersells it.
He wrote the original book on game theory! The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior with Oskar Morgenstern.
Relatedly, MAD was his conception as well.
> He wrote the original book on game theory!
I always found it endearing that von Neumann loved playing poker with friends but was admittedly terrible at it, regularly losing money.
I believe Nash himself didn't consider it particularly noteworthy either, and was far prouder of his work in pure math (like the Nash embedding theorem).
another famous piece of Von Neumann lore is that he constantly advocated nuking the Soviets.
I was wondering if someone would mention this.
It's interesting how much worse off the world would be if the smartest people were in charge of it.
What ultimately blocked his nuke proposals? (Why didn't anyone listen?) I'm curious about whatever failsafe that was.
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Even Bertrand Russell briefly advocated this. "Better dead than Red."
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.
"Most" involves great subjectivity, but how about laying the mathematical foundations for quantum mechanics?
Shannon may be gaining on him.
I vote for Wiener at this point
I'm more of a Vannevar acolyte myself.
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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.
Nowadays we'd call that "engineer's disease". I wonder how many potential Von Neumanns were discouraged from branching out into other fields by jealous gatekeepers who assume that any interest in their field by "outsiders", especially technical people, is "epistemic trespassing".
I have yet to meet a (academic) researcher that doesn't like to talk about their research topic if somebody comes and is genuinely interested. I mean most work on a topic that has maybe another 10-100 people in the world who are interested.
The problem is that instead most people to come to them are either obvious crackpots, who think they have solved cancer (energy...) and contact the person because they are a biologist, physicist ... (on a completely unrelated topic usually). Or they come from a place of arrogance, i.e. "we do ... like this, our method is clearly superior you should adopt it", or even worse here buy our clearly superior method.
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For every von Neumann you probably have thousands if not millions of crack pots with ideas not worth wasting time on. So I understand the scepticism
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Seems to me it's less about gatekeepers and more whether what you bring to the table is useful to people in that field.
If somebody truly believes they have a useful model then they don't discouraged by academic gatekeeping, they go and build Time Cube.
Usually that's because the engineer is not a very good engineer, at least outside their specialty. If they had studied engineering more, they would have probably learned that other engineers are already doing the thing they proposed.
"Using methodology from a field known for its focus on methodology in another field" was still a novel idea in von Neumann's time. But because von Neumann and others did it, and because millions of people entered science after them, most combinations like that have already been tried. Breakthroughs from combining ideas from unrelated fields require something little less obvious these days.
If someone is equal in talent to Von Neumann it's probably extremely difficult to discourage them enough via gatekeeping to stop them from making progress.
It's highly unlikely, I think, that another Von Neumann was prevented. He was a singular genius.
However, the gatekeeping you mention definitely occurs to mere mortals who might have an interesting bend on existing ideas.
Mandelbrot did this too, but he created a lot of animosity in the process because he could be really abrasive.