Book: The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann

John von Neumann, a name synonymous with the birth of modern computing, artificial intelligence, and game theory, has left a mark on the fabric of technology and science. The biography, “The Man from the Future,” penned by Ananyo Bhattacharya, offers a glance into the life of one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century.

• The landscape of mathematical thought in early 20th century: The book starts by recapping advancements in mathematics and physics in the early 20th century by famous scientists like Godel and Schrodinger
• Introduction to John von Neumann’s Life: Born Neumann János Lajos, he was a child prodigy with an exceptional mind, evident from his early inclination towards reading over traditional child’s play.
• Transition to America: Migrating in 1930, von Neumann anticipated the global shift towards war, studying the mathematics of ballistics and explosions.
• Contribution to the Atomic Bomb: His role was pivotal in determining the explosive arrangement for the “Fat Man” nuclear device.
• Pioneering Artificial Intelligence: His work laid the foundational stones for the emergence of artificial intelligence and neuroscience.
• Influence on Modern Computing: Von Neumann’s insights into computing architecture continue to influence modern digital computers and the conceptualization of the internet and cybernetics.
• Game theory and other legacy contributions

Human side

Despite being accused of not always being human, Von Neumann displayed an array of human quirks:

• He played German marching tunes loudly in his office, much to the dismay of neighbors like Einstein and Gödel
• ” ‘Johnny preferred admirals to generals, because the generals drank iced water for lunch, while the admirals when ashore drank liquor,’”
• (About Zero-Sum games): 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.
• He loved to drive FAST but was a bad driver: 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!’

Apart from Neumann himself, the book shares quite a few funny anecdotes about other researchers, too.

Multidisciplinary impact

From the development of the atomic bomb to the foundational theories behind modern computing and artificial intelligence, von Neumann’s work has had a profound impact on numerous fields:

• Nuclear Physics and the Manhattan Project: His strategic involvement in the Manhattan Project and his subsequent work on thermonuclear weapons underscored von Neumann’s pivotal role in the development of nuclear technology. His contributions to the design and understanding of nuclear fission and fusion have had lasting implications for both military strategy and energy production.
• Neural Networks and the Concept of Artificial Intelligence: By drawing parallels between the human brain and computing machines, von Neumann laid the groundwork for the field of artificial intelligence. His vision of machines that could mimic human thinking patterns anticipated future discussions and developments in AI research.
• Economic Theory: Through his work in game theory, von Neumann revolutionized economic theory, providing a mathematical framework to understand and predict the behavior of economic agents in competitive situations. This has had a profound influence on economics, political science, and psychology.
• The EDVAC Report: Von Neumann’s report on the EDVAC outlined the architecture for stored-program computers, setting the stage for future technological advancements.
• Monte Carlo Method: Innovating in the realm of computational mathematics, von Neumann introduced the Monte Carlo method, a cornerstone for solving complex problems through random sampling. This technique has become essential in fields as diverse as finance, physics, and engineering, showcasing his ability to transcend disciplinary boundaries with his insights.
• Quantum Mechanics and Game Theory: His contributions went beyond practical inventions, influencing theoretical realms such as quantum mechanics and the development of game theory.

John von Neumann’s biography offers a window into the life of a man whose intellect and contributions have shaped the modern world in innumerable ways. From his early life to his passing, von Neumann’s journey is a testament to the power of human curiosity, intellect, and the capacity to influence future generations.

My highlights

• ‘Von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my three-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us.’
• von Neumann felt that János – his real name – sounded altogether too foreign in his new home.
• von Neumann enjoyed annoying distinguished neighbours such as Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel by playing German marching tunes at top volume on his office gramophone.
• He moved to America in 1930 and, realizing early on that war was looming, studied the mathematics of ballistics and explosions.
• it was von Neumann who determined the arrangement of explosives that would be required to detonate the more powerful ‘Fat Man’ device by compressing its plutonium core.
• Later, his musings on the parallels between the workings of brains and computers helped to trigger the birth of artificial intelligence and influenced the development of neuroscience.
• Neumann János Lajos (in English, John Louis Neumann – the surname comes first in Hungarian)
• Puzzled that young Jancsi only ever played scales on the cello, his family investigated to find that the five-year-old had taken to propping up books on his music stand so he could read while ‘practising’.
• Displaying a sensitivity towards the feelings of others that is not always found in those with remarkable brains, von Neumann took care not to be overbearing yet could not but help stand apart.
• ‘God made the natural numbers; all else is the work of man,’ growled Leopold Kronecker, a contemporary grandee of German mathematics who found Cantor’s juggling with infinities suspicious and distasteful. He called Cantor a ‘charlatan’ and ‘corrupter of youth’ and squashed his hopes of moving from Halle University to a chair at the much more prestigious University of Berlin.
• The core ideas in Heisenberg’s revolutionary paper were assembled during a two-week stay in June 1925 at Heligoland, a sparsely inhabited rock shaped like a wizard’s hat that lies some 30 miles north of the German coast.
• that the two did not commute either. Multiplying position by momentum or, conversely, momentum by position gives slightly different results. The difference (less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a billionth of 1 joule-second)
• Pondering the physical meaning of noncommutativity led Heisenberg in 1927 to an extraordinary new law of nature, which stated that the position and momentum of a particle cannot both ever have exact values at the same time.
• based on the German word eigen, meaning ‘characteristic’ or ‘inherent’.
• Armed with his delta function, Dirac was able to show wave and matrix mechanics might after all be two sides of the same coin. The delta function acts as a sort of salami slicer, cutting up the wave function into manageable, ultra-thin slivers in space.
• ‘This boundary,’ he concluded, ‘can be pushed arbitrarily far into the interior of the body of the actual observer.’ And that was true, said von Neumann, right up until the act of perception (whatever that was). The ‘boundary’ that he describes is now known as the ‘Heisenberg cut’. More rarely (but perhaps more fairly) it is called the Heisenberg-von Neumann cut.
• Three years after the publication of von Neumann’s book, Schrödinger discussed with Einstein the weaknesses in what would become known as the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Inspired by their frenzied exchange of letters, Schrödinger posed the most famous thought experiment of all time to highlight the absurdity of applying quantum mechanics willy-nilly to everyday objects.
• Otto Frisch, who first explained the physics behind their results, a type of nuclear reaction that Frisch later named ‘fission’. Meitner,
• 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. More likely, von Neumann thought the problems the Navy needed him for were more pressing than those of the NDRC.
• his work at ‘Site Y’ would not be mentioned – unsurprisingly as so much of it was secret. Instead, when he was awarded the Medal for Merit by President Truman the citation was for his research on the ‘effective use of high explosives, which has resulted in the discovery of a new ordnance principle for offensive action, and which has already been proved to increase the efficiency of air power in the atomic bomb attacks upon Japan’.
• The first layer of this giant apocalyptic onion was 11.5 cm of aluminium called the ‘pusher’, designed to enhance compression of the plutonium core by preventing a steep drop in pressure behind the shock-wave front. Next came a 120 kg shell of natural uranium (unrefined uranium, composed mostly of the non-fissile isotope uranium-238, was in plentiful supply) – the ‘tamper’. Its purpose was to delay the expansion of the plutonium core inside, so allowing the chain reaction to proceed for a fraction of a second longer after detonation. For every 10 nanoseconds the tamper held the core together, another generation of neutrons would blossom inside the fissioning plutonium, violently converting more mass to energy. A hole drilled through this tamper allowed the plutonium pit, an apple-sized 6.2 kg ball 9 cm in diameter, to be inserted into the device at the very end. This was a sub-critical mass, to be squeezed into criticality by the shock wave. The plutonium pit was itself composed of two hemispheres with a 2.5 cm cavity in the middle to hold ‘urchin’, the initiator, made of polonium and beryllium and designed to trigger a chain reaction in the plutonium. Half the size of a golf ball, the initiator was a tour de force of precision engineering. The polonium isotope the scientists used, Po-210, releases alpha particles that, on striking beryllium, liberate a burst of neutrons. The two elements can be kept apart easily enough: alpha particles cannot penetrate more than a few hundredths of a millimetre into metal. But the initiator had to be carefully designed so that beryllium and polonium also mixed thoroughly the moment the plutonium core was compressed. This was achieved by plating a nugget of beryllium with nickel and gold and depositing polonium on the surface. The nugget was itself enclosed by a shell of nickel and gold-plated beryllium, which had fine grooves cut into its inside surface to hold more polonium. The implosion shock wave would crush the initiator, instantly dispersing the polonium sandwiched between the inner and outer spheres of beryllium.
• Spurred by von Neumann and the numerous computers springing up in the wake of his project, the company rapidly changed course, producing digital stored-program machines in the EDVAC mould. The IBM 701 was, says Bigelow, ‘a carbon copy of our machine’.82 By the 1960s, IBM manufactured about 70 per cent of the world’s electronic computers. ‘Probably’, Teller told his biographers, ‘the IBM company owes half its money to Johnny von Neumann.’83
• 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.
• ‘Von Neumann cleared the cobwebs from our minds as nobody else could have done,’ wrote Bigelow long afterwards. ‘A tidal wave of computational power was about to break and inundate everything in science and much elsewhere, and things would never be the same.’
• ‘You mean, the theory of games like chess?’ ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position. Now real games,’ he said, ‘are not like that at all. Real life is not like that. Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do. And that is what games are about in my theory.4 Von Neumann was not the first to analyse
• Von Neumann could not get any further with multi-player games, so he switched to thinking about a situation with just two opponents whose individual payouts sum to zero. ‘It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail,’ Iris Murdoch once wrote. Von Neumann coined the term ‘zero-sum’ to describe such games of total conflict, in which one person’s loss is the other’s gain. One indication of the influence of game theory is that ‘zero-sum’ has now passed into the vernacular.
• But the idea that the bomb be detonated within a vessel, later codenamed ‘Jumbo’, stuck, and a 14-inch-thick steel cylinder weighing around 200 tons was built for the job. It was never used, one concern being that if the bomb did actually produce an explosion even a fraction of the expected size, Jumbo would instantly be transformed into 200 tons of radioactive shrapnel. Groves, fearing Congress would regard the $12 million Jumbo to be a white elephant, ordered it destroyed. Several 500 pound demolition bombs could only blow the ends off the vessel, however. Jumbo’s rusting hulk still stands in the New Mexico desert today.
• The scientists wagered on the explosive yield of the bomb. Some still thought zero was the most likely figure. Downplaying the chance of success, Oppenheimer chose 300 tons TNT equivalent. Teller, an optimist where bombs were concerned, picked 45,000 tons and passed around a bottle of suntan lotion. The sight of scientists slapping on sunscreen in the pitch dark perturbed some of the assembled VIPs.
• Fuchs and von Neumann attended a conference at Los Alamos on thermonuclear weapons. Their jointly authored patent is somewhat euphemistically entitled Improvements in Method and Means for Utilizing Nuclear Energy. In fact, the patent contains plans for a thermonuclear weapon.
• The Fuchs-von Neumann patent is still classified in the United States but its contents are now known. Starting in the 1990s, post-Soviet Russia began declassifying and publishing historical documents relating to their bomb project – including a host of Manhattan Project papers obtained through espionage. Fuchs claimed some credit for the discovery of radiation implosion in 1950 while serving a fourteen-year prison sentence for breaking the Official Secrets Act. Von Neumann, on the other hand, never spoke about it. He was probably not keen to draw attention to his top-secret work with a self-confessed Soviet spy.
• Von Neumann’s First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC is a curious document. He mentions electronic components mostly to explain why he will not be discussing them: his aim is to describe a computer system without getting bogged down in the specifics of engineering. ‘In order to avoid this we will base our considerations on a hypothetical element, which functions essentially like a vacuum tube,’ he says.41 His ‘hypothetical element’ is an idealized neuron, shorn of its physiological complexities. This seems odd today, but von Neumann, Turing, Norbert Wiener and other thinkers who contributed to the foundations of the field that became known as ‘artificial intelligence’ did think about computers as ‘electronic brains’. Today using ‘brain’ or ‘neuron’ in the context of computers seems laughably naive. Yet we accept the similarly anthropomorphic use of ‘memory’ to mean ‘storage’ without blinking an eye.
• Ulam presented his idea to von Neumann during his next visit to Los Alamos. Von Neumann was preparing to leave, so Ulam hopped into the government car taking him to the train station, and they fleshed out the details together during the long journey. In March 1947, von Neumann sent an eleven-page plan for running Monte Carlo bomb simulations on an electronic computer to Robert Richtmyer, head of the Los Alamos theoretical division. Computers now run Monte Carlo simulations thousands of times a day, and applications range from optimizing stock portfolios to testing the properties of new materials.
• Klári’s (von Neumann’s wife) 800-command program that ran in April in Aberdeen was used to adjust the composition of atom bombs. Within that program is a ‘closed subroutine’ – a type of loop that is executed whenever it is referenced from the main body of the program. The invention of the closed subroutine is generally credited to computer scientist David Wheeler, but Klári’s code made use of one at least a year earlier, to generate random numbers by von Neumann’s ‘method of middle-squares’. Debate still rages in some quarters over whether the ENIAC in its new guise really constituted a true ‘stored-program’ computer. There can be little doubt, however, that Klári’s Monte Carlo code is the first truly useful, complex modern program ever to have been executed.
• von Neumann’s machine-gun delivery accompanied by his usual habit of wiping the blackboard clean before anyone could catch up with him probably explained why his thoughts did not immediately reach a wider audience.
• ‘If these books are unearthed sometime a few hundred years hence, people will not believe that they were written in our time,’ von Neumann confided to a friend in 1947, referring
• Despite the generally frosty reception, ‘A Model of General Economic Equilibrium’ sparked a revolution. Mathematicians, inspired by von Neumann’s achievement, poured into economics and began applying fresh methods to the dismal science. By the 1950s, the subject was transformed. Fixed-point theorems were used to prove key results in economics – including in von Neumann’s own game theory by a young upstart called John Nash. A half-dozen Nobel laureates are reckoned to have been influenced by the work.26 Among them were Kenneth Arrow and Gérard Debreu, who were awarded the prize (in 1972 and 1983 respectively) for their work on the theory of general equilibrium, which models the workings of a free-market economy. A half-century after von Neumann’s Princeton seminar, the historian Roy Weintraub described his paper as ‘the single most important article in mathematical economics’.27
• A year before the translated paper appeared, he produced Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, the book that would forever change the social sciences and profoundly influence economic and political decision-making from the 1950s to the present day.
• Morgenstern was an oddball. Tall and imperious, he rode through Princeton on horseback, immaculately attired in a business suit. He was born on 24 January 1902 in Görlitz, then in the Prussian province of Silesia, but grew up in Austria. His mother was the illegitimate daughter of German Emperor Frederick III and after he moved to the United States, Morgenstern proudly kept a portrait of his grandfather, the Kaiser, hanging in his home
• Bohr was drawing a parallel between the perturbations caused by the interactions of economic actors and the collapse of the wave function. Von Neumann’s seemingly divergent interests had a funny habit of colliding with each other in interesting ways.
• John Maynard Keynes, whose thinking shaped government policy the world over for much of the twentieth century, was ‘one of the biggest charlatans who has ever appeared on the economic scene’, said Morgenstern. ‘And everybody is on their belly before him.’
• McDonald describes two grocers being undercut by a supermarket in game-theoretic terms: ‘The two grocers make a coalition against the consumer; they play a two-man game with each other which results in taking more money from the consumer. Along comes the supermarket offering prizes or payments to the consumer in the form of lower prices (based on higher output and lower costs). Supermarket and consumer make a coalition … against the grocer coalition. The supermarket receives payments in profits (from larger volume at lower prices for each consumer); the consumer receives payments in savings. But the game is not over when the first grocer coalition retires from the field. If the supermarket has other competitors, as it usually does, the consumer can maintain a strong position by threatening coalitions with those competitors. But if the supermarket and its competitors now combine, they could make additional gains through higher prices for a while at the consumer’s expense. The situation with which the game began would then be restored, to be upset, perhaps, by another newcomer.’
• Collbohm caught the first plane he could – a B-25 bomber – to company headquarters in Santa Monica, where he rounded up Douglas and a few other company executives. The deal was done quickly. Arnold told the group he had $10 million of unspent funds from his wartime research budget which he was willing to give Douglas Aircraft to fund the new outfit. Douglas agreed to find space for the organization at their Santa Monica offices. Arthur Raymond, Douglas Aircraft’s chief engineer, suggested the name: RAND for ‘Research ANd Development’. Collbohm volunteered to lead it until a more suitable candidate could be found. His ‘temporary’ appointment as director would last twenty years.
• The think tank’s very first report was released on 2 May 1946. Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship concluded that ‘modern technology has advanced to a point where it now appears feasible to undertake the design of a satellite vehicle’. Such a craft would be ‘one of the most potent scientific tools of the Twentieth Century’ and the achievement ‘would inflame the imagination of mankind, and would probably produce repercussions in the world comparable to the explosion of the atomic bomb’.
• Early computing work on the ‘Super’ required random numbers for Monte Carlo simulations, so RAND engineers built an electronic device to generate them. This was compiled into a surprise best-seller entitled A Million Random Digits and 100,000 Normal Deviates.
• Let each boy propose to his best girl. Let each girl with several proposals reject all but her favorite, but defer acceptance until she is sure no one better will come her way. The rejected boys then propose to their next-best choices, and so on, until there are no girls with more than one suitor. Marry. The result is stable, since the extramarital liaisons that were previously rejected will be disliked by the girl partners, while all others will be disliked by the boy partners.31
• 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. The physically imposing Nash later threw his future wife ‘to the ground and placed his foot on her neck’ during a maths department picnic.33
• Nash implied that his own blood lines were pretty good.’
• 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.
• Some futurologists are now speculating that a superhuman artificial intelligence could transform human society beyond all recognition. That possibility has become known as the technological ‘singularity’ – and that term was first used by someone who had foreseen the possibility decades earlier: John von Neumann.99
• 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!’
• ‘For progress there is no cure.

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