JOHN VON NEUMANN: a Calculating Man
A great mind teaches an electronic brain how to remember
Thinking was both business and pleasure for John von Neumann, and nowhere did he do it better than on the railroad trains that shuttled him between the many federal agencies and private companies he served as a blue-ribbon consultant. Staring at the rail-car ceiling, the great mathematician muttered intermittently as his mind raced along the path of logic like a steam locomotive. Before the train reached its destination, von Neumann usually reached his--or at the very least a way station in whatever intellectual journey he was on. He was an explorer of realms too abstruse to be penetrated by more than a small fraction of humanity--and yet of massive import. One stop on his itinerary was Los Alamos, N.M. (It was he who devised the implosion lens that triggered the plutonium-type atomic bomb.) Another stop was the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. There and on arriving and departing trains, von Neumann figured out how to give the nascent electronic computer a storable memory--an invention as vital to the future of computing as the wheel was to chariot racing.
Born in Budapest in 1903 as Neumann Janos (the "von" came later when his father, a banker, was ennobled), he had been a classic prodigy child. He had scarcely outgrown baby food before he was gulping down science and world history. When he was not yet out of high school, mathematicians were already treating him like a colleague. In his 20s, the milestones flew by--the award of his doctorate, appointments to the Universities of Berlin and Hamburg, publication of papers noticed around the world, including one in which he mathematicized quantum mechanics. A summons from Princeton brought his migration across the Atlantic in 1930. And in 1933 the 30-year-old von Neumann became the youngest professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, a new think tank stocked with big catches, Albert Einstein among them.
In America, von Neumann developed a reputation for sharing the fruits of his genius with great generosity. Scholars (and later bureaucrats and businessmen) discovered that he could solve problems in mathematics and physics that baffled others. And he often seemed not to care who got the credit; his pleasure came from the brain work. At seminars, conferences, and sherry parties, admirers frequently tested the storied ability of this pear-shaped little man in bankers' pinstripes to make elaborate calculations in his head at incredible speed. They would pitch him a problem and watch while he went into deep concentration, hopping from foot to foot as he closed on his quarry. After a minute or two, he produced a solution that would have taken almost anyone else hours at best.
As much as he prided himself on these command performances, von Neumann took pains not to come across as arrogant or condescending. "Johnny" worked the room with an ingratiating smile and copious bonhomie. He might mumble "nebbish, nebbish" to himself when some long-winded confrere spouted bad science from the speaker's platform. Yet he treated everyone with pronounced politeness, whether Nobel laureate or graduate assistant, wise man or fool. When a disagreement became emotional, he broke the tension by telling a dirty joke (science was still a stag affair), the punch line all the funnier when delivered in an erudite Hungarian accent. He hosted lively parties at his rambling colonial on Westcott Road in Princeton. Bowing low like an Old World courtier, he somehow managed to introduce most of his guests without saying their names. His memory was prodigious but selective--he could recite page after page from works read in childhood yet had trouble remembering people's names.
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