Academics From Hungary

"There probably is a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn't."

"If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o' clock, I say why not one o' clock?"

"Some people confess guilt to claim credit for the sin."

"It will not be sufficient to know that the enemy has only fifty possible tricks and that we can counter every one of them, but we must be able to counter them almost at the very instant they occur."

"One of the world's great mathematicians."

"John von Neumann was an enormous personality."

"Princeton was the place which had all these names—Einstein, Weyl, von Neumann—who were great figures at the time."

"I met him, but in a sense, he didn’t meet me. We were introduced at a game theory conference in 1955, two years before he died. I said, “Hello, Professor von Neumann,” and he was very cordial, but I don’t think he remembered me afterwards unless he was even more extraordinary than everybody says. I was a young person and he was a great star."

"I think I had some feeling that their minds [von Neumann and Weyl] were so far ahead of mine that it was difficult to follow their thoughts."

"If one applies an appropriately broad view of physics one must say that von Neumann had a quite outstanding insight into the problems of physics. Because he has done first-rate work, and he was the man who succeeded in giving a correct mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, and this was the major theory in physics in the first half of the century."

"Nobody doubts that von Neumann was brilliant; everybody admits that."

"Nevertheless, it was generally agreed that von Neumann was the leading mathematical mind in the world at that time."

"By any standard, von Neumann, was one of the most creative and versatile scientists of the twentieth century."

"Von Neumann had a phenomenal capacity for doing mental computations of all kinds. His thought processes were extremely fast, and often he would see through to the end of someone’s argument almost before the speaker had got out the first few sentences. Recently, one of von Neumann’s colleagues said in affectionate explanation of von Neumann’s power, “You see, Johnny wasn’t human. But after living with humans for so long he learned how to do a remarkable imitation of one.”"

"One of the most brilliant mathematicians who ever lived."

"Von Neumann was considered to be the most brilliant of the young mathematicians."

"Von Neumann had an absolute paranoia about the Russians and favored a first nuclear strike. Einstein referred to him as a Denktier, a think animal."

"I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man."

"I always thought Johnny’s brain indicated that he belonged to a new species, an evolution beyond man."

"It’s impossible to truly understand the speed at which von Neumann’s brain worked and how he thought, even for the cleverest observers. I drop hints about how fast and clever he was, but I don’t pretend to fully understand or get to grips with his human side. I’m not sure if I can, as some of his friends even said that von Neumann was an alien, a superintelligent being that had studied humans and learned how to copy us perfectly."

"Probably the smartest man on Earth."

"He had the kind of mind that if you go in to see him with an idea, inside of five minutes he's five blocks ahead of you and sees exactly where it's going. His mind was just so fast and so accurate that there was no keeping up with him. There was nobody on earth, as far as I'm concerned, who was in his category."

"His mind was faster than anybody's."

"He stimulated people everywhere. Von Neumann was generous intellectually, because his resources were so enormous, that he never gave away anything that he couldn't do without. He was a fountainhead of information, and he didn't hold back because there was always much more in depth than he ever exposed at one time. I'm not exaggerating. This was indeed how he was. In the few decades that followed, I have had the experience of understanding what this was like, by working as a consultant for some groups who were at a technical level so far below what I knew myself, that what they felt was worth bickering about was in fact possible [?] that one could ignore it, because one knows one has much more in depth than that and that's not an important point. Let them bicker about it, or let them think that they did something great. He was precisely that way. He was in depth, more knowledgeable than any man, and I say this having worked with Wiener for four years, and Wiener was no slouch himself. Von Neumann was a giant. He was ahead of anybody."

"What Von Neumann contributed as far as the engineering was concerned, was simply the enormous confidence everybody had that a machine so simple, and with no more doodads on it could knock dead, so to speak, an enormous amount of the computation that needed to be done in this world for the next few decades. He never came over and said to make a circuit of this, but he did know so much more of the deeper aspects of mathematics and the practical aspects of computation than any of the rest of us. What he did essentially, was to serve as this unshakable confidence that said: "Go ahead, nothing else matters, get it running at this speed and this capability, and the rest of it is just a lot of nonsense.""

"John von Neumann's brilliant mind blazed over lattice theory like a meteor."

"I went in and started telling him about my thesis. He listened for about ten minutes and asked me a couple of questions, and then he started telling me about my thesis. What you have really done is this, and probably this is true, and you could have done it in a somewhat simpler way, and so on. He was a really remarkable man. He listened to me talk about this rather obscure subject and in ten minutes he knew more about it than I did. He was extremely quick. I think he may have wasted a certain amount of time, by the way, because he was so willing to listen to second- or third-rate people and think about their problems. I saw him do that on many occasions."

"At the age of 6 he was able to divide two eight-digit numbers in his head. By the age of 8 he had mastered college calculus and as a trick could memorize on sight a column in a telephone book and repeat back the names, addresses and numbers. History was only a “hobby,” but by the outbreak of World War I, when he was 10, his photographic mind had absorbed most of the contents of the 46-volume works edited by the German historian Oncken with a sophistication that startled his elders."

"Several years ago his wife gave him a 21-volume Cambridge History set, and she is sure he memorized every name and fact in the books. “He is a major expert on all the royal family trees in Europe,” a friend said once. “He can tell you who fell in love with whom, and why, what obscure cousin this or that czar married, how many illegitimate children he had and so on.” One night during the Princeton days a world-famous expert on Byzantine history came to the Von Neumann house for a party. “Johnny and the professor got into a corner and began discussing some obscure facet,” recalls a friend who was there. “Then an argument arose over a date. Johnny insisted it was this, the professor that. So Johnny said, ‘Let’s get the book.’ They looked it up and Johnny was right. A few weeks later the professor was invited to the Von Neumann house again. He called Mrs. von Neumann and said jokingly, ‘I’ll come if Johnny promises not to discuss Byzantine history. Everybody thinks I am the world’s greatest expert in it and I want them to keep on thinking that.'”"

"One day he was urgently summoned to the offices of the Rand Corporation, a government-sponsored scientific research organization in Santa Monica, Calif. Rand scientists had come up with a problem so complex that the electronic computers then in existence seemingly could not handle it. The scientists wanted Von Neumann to invent a new kind of computer. After listening to the scientists expound, Von Neumann broke in: “Well, gentlemen, suppose you tell me exactly what the problem is?” For the next two hours the men at Rand lectured, scribbled on blackboards, and brought charts and tables back and forth. Von Neumann sat with his head buried in his hands. When the presentation was completed, he scribbled on a pad, stared so blankly that a Rand scientist later said he looked as if “his mind had slipped his face out of gear,” then said, “Gentlemen, you do not need the computer. I have the answer.” While the scientists sat in stunned silence, Von Neumann reeled off the various steps which would provide the solution to the problem. Having risen to this routine challenge, Von Neumann followed up with a routine suggestion: “Let’s go to lunch.”"

"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."

"After the last visitor had departed Von Neumann would retire to his second-floor study to work on the paper which he knew would be his last contribution to science. It was an attempt to formulate a concept shedding new light on the workings of the human brain. He believed that if such a concept could be stated with certainty, it would also be applicable to electronic computers and would permit man to make a major step forward in using these 'automata'. In principle, he reasoned, there was no reason why some day a machine might not be built which not only could perform most of the functions of the human brain but could actually reproduce itself, i.e., create more supermachines like it. He proposed to present this paper at Yale, where he had been invited to give the 1956 Silliman Lectures."

"Probably the greatest mathematician of the century."

""Johnny," as all his friends called him, was the only scientist of the era to whom the word "genius" was almost universally applied. He had an uncanny ability to handle complex mathematical calculations in seconds. When he was six years old he could divide one eight-digit number into another, entirely in his head."

"Then, of course, there was Neumann, who always knew everything anyhow."

"Weyl had a very tremendous respect for him, and I could see in this advanced, seminar when Weyl didn't know the answer he would say, "Neumann, how does that go?" We all realized this was a great mathematician."

"His effectiveness was largely due to his ever-present mental manipulatory quickness. He could literally "think on his feet," and much of his best work may have received its initial impulse in just this way. He had a prodigious memory, and legend has it that he knew all the facts and dates from many volumes of standard histories by heart."

"He was also a great reader of books on history throughout his life, and in both science and history his retentive memory was most remarkable."

"It was also well remembered about 25 years later by one of his colleagues here at the time, M. Plancherel, who mentioned it to me then as an example of the extraordinary ability H. Weyl had, shared only by J. von Neumann among the mathematicians he had known, to get into a new subject and bring an important contribution to it within a few months."

"Von Neumann was considered the leading mathematician in the United States."

"Great mathematician."

"He would seize on the fuzzy notions of others and, by dint of his prodigious mental powers, leap five blocks ahead of the pack. “You would tell him something garbled, and he’d say, ‘Oh, you mean the following,’ and it would come back beautifully stated,” said his onetime protégé, the Harvard mathematician Raoul Bott."

"Von Neumann is a great scientific hero to me because it seemed… he seemed to have something. And of course it may be envy rather than admiration, but it's good to envy someone like von Neumann."

"Mathematics is not a pompous activity, least of all in the hands of extraordinarily fast and penetrating minds like Johnny von Neumann."

"There was something endearing and personal about Johnny von Neumann. He was the cleverest man I ever knew, without exception. And he was a genius, in the sense that a genius is a man who has two great ideas. When he died in 1957 it was a great tragedy to us all."

"In a Silliman lecture ... John von Neumann, who was dying at the time, wrote some of the most splendid sentences he wrote in all his life ... He pointed out that there were good grounds merely in terms of electrical analysis to show that the mind, the brain itself, could not be working on a digital system. It did not have enough accuracy; or ... it did not have enough memory. ... And he wrote some classical sentences saying there is a statistical language in the brain ... different from any other statistical language that we use... this is what we have to discover. ...I think we shall make some progress along the lines of looking for what kind of statistical language would work."

"The greatest polymath of the 20th century."

"The crucial point: in Dr. von Neumann the Institute has perhaps the cleverest man in the world, and the really deciding factor in the end should, I am sure, be what he wants to do."

"Von Neumann was a very great mathematician. He made many important contributions in a wide range of fields."

"The manuscripts for both parts of the present volume were unfinished; indeed, they were both, in a sense, first drafts. There is one compensation in this: one can see von Neumann's powerful mind at work."