The Man From the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya
Ananyo Bhattacharya
- 17 minutes read - 3425 wordsAuthor: Ananyo Bhattacharya
Rating: ★★
For much of my life, in multiple ways, I have been exposed to the myth and mystery of the mathematician, scientist, physicist, and general smart fellow, John von Neumann.
Name an area of scientific or mathematical advancement in the 20th century, and you’re likely to see von Neumann’s thumbprint somewhere in the mix. Computers, today, run on von Neumann architecture, von Neumann’s hawkishness defined American foreign policy, he was at the Trinity atomic bomb test in Los Alamos, he defined concepts in game theory and abstract computation. He was an intellectual titan. I was absolutely in the target market and…
I was really bored throughout most of this book.
One reviewer remarked that the history of von Neumann’s native Budapest in the early turn of the century was the most vibrant part. This is correct, it feels like we’re reading some delightful time-travel book where someone goes to some pivotal city between East and West and marvels at how the city predicts a grand future, and also harbors the seeds that will rip the world apart in just a few short years e.g. Paris, Vienna, Odessa, Beirut. Cosmopolitan and capitalist, wealthy Jewish merchant family buys their way into Germanic respectability and acquire a Germanic surname with the noble preposition “von”!. Their children are educated in business, art, science, and mathematics with an eye to advancing the family business and station. Reading about the recently united villages of Óbuda and Pest conjured the closing blissful ignorance of Austro-Hungarian wealth and luxury. In many ways I could see an echo to the life of Wittgenstein in which a scholar finds himself wealthy, curious, and trapped between East and West as the world unravels.
In this place and time the young von Neumann’s irrepressible intellect has him studying mathematics, chemistry, and professorships on the way to becoming one of the brightest stars within European mathematics. He’s pursuing multiple degrees in multiple universities: courting the cutting edge in mathematics while doing superior work in chemistry so as to fool his father that he’s doing something practical versus pure math.
But von Neumann was doomed to live in violent hateful times and in the thirties he and not all of his family flee anti-Semitism and Nazism. He and his (first) wife relocate to Princeton, New Jersey where the become part of the brain trust that will later extend to include Oppenheimer, Einstein, Claude Shannon, Erdos, and countless other thinkers. One could argue that the future that we know was born in that research campus. As consequence, AT&T/Bellcore will be born in the vicinity and help usher in the transistor era, the internet, Unix and the C programming language. It was an impactful little bit of geography.
But then the book gets staggeringly boring in the last 5 chapters or so. While the first half had a motivating and powerful narrative arc, many of the latter chapters are:
von Neumann got interested in X, he did work around X, X turned out to be important and the work was carried on by Superstar 1 and Superstar 2
Rinse, wash repeat. I just felt the joy of the project dissipate.
I found myself dragging myself through the last quarter of the book for some of the beautiful phrasings and sentences that described von Neumann (see below), but I can’t say that I gained much additional insight into the man or his research.
Bhattacharya, for his part has the formidable intellect to understand and explain some of von Neumann’s challenging material, on this I give him full marks. He also has a capability for an artistic turn of phrase. Again, here, I must recognize his talent and art. But the structure of the book just somehow loses its joy. I feel like an editor or a publisher must have crept in here and insisted on more chapters and, obliging, they were tacked on to a considered, smaller-scoped joy of a book.
{
"title": "The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann",
"author": "Ananyo Bhattacharya",
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"highlight": "Created when the old capital of Buda was merged with the nearby cities of Óbuda and Pest in 1873, Budapest was thriving.",
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{
"highlight": "Nearly all the Martians went to one of three elite fee-paying gymnasia in Budapest.",
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"highlight": "‘At no time did we memorize rules from the book,’ says von Kármán’s son, Theodore, who attended the school. ‘Instead we sought to develop them ourselves.",
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"highlight": "In my case the Minta gave me a thorough grounding in inductive reasoning, that is, deriving general rules from specific examples – an approach that remained with me throughout my life.’",
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{
"highlight": "The Lutheran school was open to boys (there were scant educational opportunities for girls) of all faiths. Because the professional classes in Budapest were dominated by Jews, most of the students at the Lutheran school were in fact of Jewish descent.",
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{
"highlight": "‘The reáliskola was not at all inferior to the gimnázium, just different in scope and somewhat more practical then the “gentlemanly” gimnázium,’ according to one historian and ‘boasted extraordinary students in mathematics and the sciences’.",
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"highlight": "Von Neumann himself attributed his generation’s success to ‘a coincidence of some cultural factors’ that produced ‘a feeling of extreme insecurity in the individuals, and the necessity to produce the unusual or face extinction’.18 In other words, their recognition that the tolerant climate of Hungary might change overnight propelled some to preternatural efforts to succeed.",
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"highlight": "‘Johnny’s unique gift as a mathematician was to transform problems in all areas of mathematics into problems of logic,’",
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"highlight": "His first paper is a fine example of his style of thinking. A theorem which appears to belong to geometry, restricting the possible positions of points where some function of a complex variable is equal to zero, is transformed into a statement of pure logic. All the geometrical complications disappear, and the proof of the theorem becomes short and easy.",
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"highlight": "The Communist official with the red armband promptly went there, took it, and the committee left and we remained in the apartment.’8",
"location": 305,
"annotation": "Workikng frnthr absftrsvtion of th people.seems to invite corruption especially as ome wrongs no one bhut an abstraction"
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"highlight": "The roots of the foundational crisis lay in the discovery of flaws in Euclid’s Elements, the standard textbook in geometry for centuries.",
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"highlight": "Bolyai’s father, himself a geometer, heard about his intention to work on the fifth postulate, he urged him to desist: ‘Learn from my example: I wanted to know about parallels, I remain ignorant, this has taken all the flowers of my life and all my time from me.’14",
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"highlight": "What Bolyai and Lobachevsky had discovered is now known as hyperbolic geometry.",
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"highlight": "To avoid relying on the intuition of his readers, the familiar terms of school geometry (points, lines, planes, etc.) were emptied of their meaning. In his book these words were simply convenient labels for mathematical objects that would be rigorously defined by the mathematical relationships between them.",
"location": 385,
"annotation": "The principle of vector graphics"
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{
"highlight": "Hilbert defined his axioms with a rigour that went well beyond Euclid’s. His improved axiomatic method would come to define the way mathematics was done in the twentieth century.",
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"highlight": "In 1928, he challenged his followers to prove that mathematics is complete, consistent and decidable.",
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"highlight": "The third of Hilbert’s demands, that mathematics should be decidable, became widely known as the Entscheidungsproblem: is there a step-by-step procedure (an algorithm) that can be used to show whether or not any particular mathematical statement can be proved?",
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"highlight": "He would eventually show decisively that at the deepest level Heisenberg’s and Schrödinger’s theories were one and the same.",
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"highlight": "Von Neumann was the first to crack it, showing decisively that wave and matrix mechanics were fundamentally the same theory.",
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"highlight": "during the war, for",
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"highlight": "‘Johnny’s fascination and preoccupation with the shape of things to come never ceased.’",
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"highlight": "Neumann adopted the terminology and notation of McCulloch and Pitts to describe for the first time the structure of a stored-program computer. Theirs was the only paper he would cite in the whole of the EDVAC report. There were five distinct parts or ‘organs’ in the assembly that von Neumann described. The first three components were a ‘central arithmetic’ unit for performing mathematical operations such as addition and multiplication; a ‘central control’ unit to ensure that instructions were executed in the proper order; and a ‘memory’, a single organ that would store both computer code and numbers. The fourth and fifth components were the input and output units, for shipping data in or out of the machine.",
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"highlight": "When Goldstine received the report, he was in raptures. He congratulated von Neumann for providing the first ‘complete logical framework for the machine’ and contrasted the streamlined design with the ENIAC, which was ‘chuck full of gadgets that have as their only raison d’etre that they appealed to John Mauchly’.43",
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"highlight": "Ulam realized that many real-world problems are surprisingly similar in nature to working out the chances of winning solitaire. A complex situation can be made tractable by setting up a model that is then run repeatedly to reveal the most likely outcomes.",
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"highlight": "Game theory sprang from von Neumann’s urge to find neat mathematical solutions to knotty real-world problems during one of the most ‘disorderly and irrational’ periods in human history.",
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"highlight": "On 7 December 1926, von Neumann unveiled his proof of the minimax theorem to mathematicians at Göttingen. Published in 1928, the paper expounding his proof, On the Theory of Parlour Games,10 would firmly establish game theory as a discipline, framing human cooperation and conflict in truly mathematical terms.",
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"highlight": "Ultimately, a game can be represented simply as the choice by each player of a single strategy (effectively an amalgam of all the strategies they play in the game), followed by a calculation of their respective payouts that accounts for everyone’s choices (and which factors in their luck).",
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"highlight": "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.",
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"highlight": "Von Neumann set out to prove that every two-player zero-sum game similarly has a ‘solution’. That is, a strategy for each player that guarantees the best outcome given they are up against a rational player who is exclusively out for themselves too.",
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"highlight": "Outside France, von Neumann’s 1928 minimax paper is today recognized as the founding work of game theory.",
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{
"highlight": "his conclusion that every two-person zero-sum game has a solution that is either a pure or mixed strategy.",
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"highlight": "‘Any event,’ von Neumann says, ‘may be regarded as a game of strategy if one looks at the effect it has on the participants.’",
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"highlight": "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.",
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{
"highlight": "was his way, von Neumann had moved on long before anyone really recognized its significance. 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.",
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"highlight": "Von Neumann’s seemingly divergent interests had a funny habit of colliding with each other in interesting ways.",
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{
"highlight": "A guiding principle cannot be formulated by the requirement of maximizing two (or more) functions at once.’",
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"highlight": "Von Neumann gives two ways to represent games which are still used by game theorists today: the ‘extensive’ form and the ‘normalized’ form.",
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"highlight": "Von Neumann called chess and tic-tac-toe games of ‘perfect information’",
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"highlight": "Arnold urged the Air Force to prepare for a future in which scientists would play a leading role in warfare. ‘For the last twenty years we have built and run the Air Force on pilots,’ he told the Navy top brass. ‘But we can’t do that anymore. We’ve got to think of what we’ll need in terms of twenty years from now.’",
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{
"highlight": "I am anxious that the Air Force’s post war and next war research and development be placed on a sound and continuing basis.’",
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"highlight": "Eventually Dantzig would help to invent an entirely new discipline called ‘linear programming’ to deal with the process.",
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"highlight": "His relationship with the think tank would only come to an end in 1954, when he became a victim of one of the many police sting operations that aimed to force gay men to leave town.",
"location": 3679,
"annotation": "Oh snap"
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{
"highlight": "‘His hatred, his loathing for the Nazis was essentially boundless,’",
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"annotation": ""
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"highlight": "By the time von Neumann visited Europe again in 1949, his belief in people had evaporated away altogether. ‘I feel the opposite of nostalgia for Europe,’ he wrote to Klári, ‘because every corner reminds me . . . of the world which is gone, and the ruins of which is no solace. My second reason for disliking Europe is the memory of my total disillusionment in human decency between 1933 and September 1938.’",
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"highlight": "The inspiration for all these efforts and more is a book entitled Theory of Self-reproducing Automata;",
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{
"highlight": "In his usual way, von Neumann dabbled brilliantly, widely and rather inconclusively in the subject but intuitively hit upon a number of ideas that would prove to be fertile areas of research for others.",
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"annotation": ""
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{
"highlight": "former area was the province of physiology in the case of neurons, and electrical engineering for vacuum tubes. The latter would treat these elements as idealized ‘black boxes’ that would be assumed to behave in predictable ways. This would be the province of von Neumann’s automata theory.",
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"highlight": "The theory of automata was first unveiled in a lecture in Pasadena on 24 September 1948, at the Hixon Symposium on Cerebral Mechanisms in Behaviour and published in 1951.",
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"annotation": ""
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{
"highlight": "At the heart of von Neumann’s theory is the Universal Turing machine.",
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"highlight": "He argues that three things are necessary and sufficient. First, the machine requires a set of instructions that describe how to build another like it – like Turing’s paper tape but made of the same ‘stuff’ as the machine itself. Second, the machine must have a construction unit that can build a new automaton by executing these instructions. Finally, the machine needs a unit that is able to create a copy of the instructions and insert them into the new machine.",
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{
"highlight": "tests. If the component it has caught between its pincers is transmitting a regular pulse, for example, then it is a signal-transmitter; if it contracts when stimulated, it is muscle.",
"location": 4253,
"annotation": "Uses function to flrm identification versus typing"
},
{
"highlight": "Did self-reproduction require three dimensions, or would a two-dimensional plane suffice?",
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"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Inspired, von Neumann developed what would become known as his ‘cellular’ model of automata.",
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{
"highlight": "They are also witnessing in action the very first computer virus ever designed, and a milestone in theoretical computer science.",
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"annotation": ""
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{
"highlight": "cellular automata could be a model of fundamental physics.’",
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},
{
"highlight": "Toffoli conjectured, the complex laws of physics might be rewritten more simply in terms of automata.",
"location": 4404,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "‘By the middle of this century, mankind had acquired the power to extinguish life,’ he wrote. ‘By the end of the century, he will be able to create it. Of the two, it is hard to say which places the larger burden of responsibilities on our shoulders.’",
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"highlight": "When Schelling applied these rules, an initially mixed board partitioned quickly into homogeneous neighbourhoods of the same colour.87 Even a relatively mild proclivity for like-coloured neighbours resulted in segregation. Any preference stronger than 1:3 triggered exodus and eventual partition. ‘Surprisingly, the results generated by this analysis do not depend upon each color’s having a preference for living separately,’ noted Schelling. ‘They do not even depend on a preference for being in the majority!’",
"location": 4841,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "once the counters had segregated, the process could not be reversed by softening the bias towards like-coloured companions.",
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"annotation": ""
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{
"highlight": "Schelling had produced two powerful conclusions with a fairly elementary model. First, cities can become segregated along lines of race even if no one minds living in a mixed community. Second, only an active desire for diversity leads to diverse neighbourhoods. Indifference results in segregation.",
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},
{
"highlight": "Jastrow in 1981, ‘who will minister to its bodily needs with electricity and spare parts. Man will also provide for computer reproduction . . . We are the reproductive organs of the computer.’",
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"annotation": ""
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{
"highlight": "A rich cornucopia of possibilities flowed from von Neumann’s lectures on ‘The General and Logical Theory of Automata’ at the Hixon Symposium on Cerebral Mechanisms in Behaviour in 1948. But von Neumann was interested in more than merely proving the possibility of replicating machines.",
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"highlight": "A young Jeremy Bernstein, who heard von Neumann expounding his ideas as an undergraduate at Harvard University, described the talks as ‘the best lectures I have ever heard on anything – like mental champagne’.93",
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{
"highlight": "McCarthy was proposing to bootstrap his way to machine intelligence by pitting one automaton against another.",
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"highlight": "How, then, do brains far more mundane than von Neumann’s accomplish incredible feats that defeat today’s most sophisticated computers like, for example, making up an amusing pun? The answer is that neurons do not fire one after the other, but do their work simultaneously: they are not serial, like von Neumann architecture computers, but parallel – massively so. It was a lasting insight.",
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"highlight": "In coining the term ‘singularity’, in conversation with Ulam, von Neumann imagined a point ‘in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue’.",
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{
"highlight": "Von Neumann hoped the best in people would triumph and tried to be as magnanimous and honourable as possible. But experience and reason taught him to avoid placing too much faith in human virtue.",
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{
"highlight": "But all technological progress, he warns, will also inevitably be harnessed for military use.",
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{
"highlight": "But what we cannot do, he says, is stop the march of ideas. ‘The very techniques that create the dangers and the instabilities are in themselves useful, or closely related to the useful,’ he argues.",
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}