Complexity_ A Guided Tour - Melanie Mitchell [59]
John von Neumann
It is worth saying a few words about von Neumann himself, one of the most important and interesting figures in science and mathematics in the twentieth century. He is someone you should know about if you don’t already. Von Neumann was, by anyone’s measure, a true genius. During his relatively short life he made fundamental contributions to at least six fields: mathematics, physics, computer science, economics, biology, and neuroscience. He is the type of genius whom people tell stories about, shaking their heads and wondering whether someone that smart could really be a member of the human species. I like these stories so much, I want to retell a few of them here.
Unlike Einstein and Darwin, whose genius took a while to develop, Hungarian born “Johnny” von Neumann was a child prodigy. He supposedly could divide eight-digit numbers in his head at the age of six. (It evidently took him a while to notice that not everyone could do this; as reported in one of his biographies, “When his mother once stared rather aimlessly in front of her, six-year-old Johnny asked: ‘What are you calculating?’ ”) At the same age he also could converse with his father in ancient Greek.
At the age of eighteen von Neumann went to university, first in Budapest, then in Germany and Switzerland. He first took the “practical” course of studying chemical engineering but couldn’t be kept away from mathematics. He received a doctorate in math at the age of twenty-three, after doing fundamental work in both mathematical logic and quantum mechanics. His work was so good that just five years later he was given the best academic job in the world—a professorship (with Einstein and Gödel) at the newly formed Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton.
The institute didn’t go wrong in their bet on von Neumann. During the next ten years, von Neumann went on to invent the field of game theory (producing what has been called “the greatest paper on mathematical economics ever written”), design the conceptual framework of one of the first programmable computers (the EDVAC, for which he wrote what has been called “the most important document ever written about computing and computers”), and make central contributions to the development of the first atomic and hydrogen bombs. This was all before his work on self-reproducing automata and his exploration of the relationships between the logic of computers and the workings of the brain. Von Neumann also was active in politics (his positions were very conservative, driven by strong anti-communist views) and eventually became a member of the Atomic Energy Commission, which advised the U.S. president on nuclear weapons policy.
Von Neumann was part of what has been called the “Hungarian phenomenon,” a group of several Hungarians of similar age who went on to become world-famous scientists. This group also included Leo Szilard, whom we heard about in chapter 3, the physicists Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, and Denis Gabor, and the mathematicians Paul Erdös, John Kemeny, and Peter Lax. Many people have speculated on the causes of this improbable cluster of incredible talent. But as related by von Neumann biographer Norman MacRae, “Five of Hungary’s six Nobel Prize winners were Jews born between 1875 and 1905, and one was asked why Hungary in his generation had brought forth so many geniuses. Nobel laureate Wigner replied that he did not understand the question. Hungary in that time had produced only one genius, Johnny von Neumann.”
Von Neumann was in many ways ahead of his time. His goal was, like Turing’s, to develop a general theory of information processing that would encompass both biology and technology. His work on self-reproducing automata was part of this program. Von Neumann also was closely linked to the so-called cybernetics community—an interdisciplinary group of scientists and engineers seeking commonalities among complex, adaptive systems in both natural and artificial realms. What we now call “complex systems” can