Quote by John von Neumann

"One day, during an ICBM meeting on the West Coast, a physicist employed by an aircraft company approached Von Neumann with a detailed plan for one phase of the project. It consisted of a tome several hundred pages long on which the physicist had worked for eight months. Von Neumann took the book and flipped through the first several pages. Then he turned it over and began reading from back to front. He jotted down a figure on a pad, then a second and a third. He looked out the window for several seconds, returned the book to the physicist and said, “It won’t work.” The physicist returned to his company. After two months of re-evaluation, he came to the same conclusion."

— John von Neumann

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Polymaths Academics from the United States Mathematicians from the United States Academics from Hungary Mathematicians from Hungary

Original Language: English

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Sources

Clay Blair Jr., in Passing of a Great Mind: John von Neumann, a Brilliant, Jovial Mathematician, was a Prodigious Servant of Science and his Country (25 February 1957)

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann

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John von Neumann

John von Neumann (28 December 1903 – 8 February 1957) was a Hungarian-American-Jewish mathematician, physicist, inventor, computer scientist, and polymath. He made major contributions to a number of fields, including mathematics (foundations of mathematics, functional analysis, ergodic theory, geometry, set theory, topology, and numerical analysis), physics (quantum mechanics, hydrodynamics and quantum statistical mechanics), economics (game theory), computing (Von Neumann architecture, linear p

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