Academics From Hungary

"He was about as likable a chap as you could imagine. There is just one short thing about him. I was riding in a Pullman one day in the lounge car after the war and I hadn't looked about me before I sat down; I was reading something and it had my full attention. From across came von Neumann. He sat down aside me and introduced himself. Well here was the man who, in my opinion, was the most able mathematician in the country in many ways and he felt that he needed to introduce himself to me. That's a type of modesty one can't help liking."

"He was a superb lecturer. Superb."

"He was incredible - the enormous perception that he had. For me, ever since, a standard of comparison has always been von Neumann. And if I say, "He reminds me of von Neumann," that's about the best compliment I can give anyone."

"He was incredibly perceptive."

"[He] thought so fast that he very often anticipated what one was going to say. . . . a pleasant agreeable person . . . the amazing logic of his thought processes."

"Von Neumann was capable of all sorts of remarkable things."

"The smartest man in the world."

"Genius of the highest order."

"Now the story doesn't end here. Before going on with it, however, I'd like to introduce you to Johnnie von Neumann, an incredible genius whose mind worked about as rapidly as the super high-speed computers he helped design."

"Bennie decided to approach Johnnie on the matter and arranged to travel to Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, headed up at the time by Oppenheimer, where Johnnie (and lesser geniuses such as Albert Einstein) was stationed."

"He did a tremendous amount of different things in mathematics, many of them revolutionary."

"Mr. von Neumann, in spite of his youth, is a completely exceptional personality ... who has already done very productive work ... and whose future development is being watched with great expectation in many places."

"Von Neumann I never could quite figure out. He was just too fast for me."

"Strange, contradictory, and controversial person; childish and good-humored, sophisticated and savage, brilliantly clever yet with very limited, almost primitive lack of ability to handle his emotions—an enigma of nature that will have to remain unsolved."

"[One early 1945 night,] he woke up and started talking at a speed which, even for him, was extraordinarily fast. “What we are creating now is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left, yet it would be impossible not to see it through, not only for the military reasons, but it would also be unethical from the point of view of the scientists not to do what they know is feasible, no matter what terrible consequences it may have. And this is only the beginning!” The concerns von Neumann voiced that night were less about nuclear weapons, and more about the growing powers of machines. “From here on, Johnny’s fascination and preoccupation with the shape of things to come never ceased,” concludes Klári’s account. For the next seven years he neglected mathematics and devoted himself to the advance of technology in all forms. “It was almost as if he knew that there was not very much time left.”"

"He had always done his writing at home during the night or at dawn. His capacity for work was practically unlimited."

"People would come to him because of his great insight."

"In von Neumann’s generation his ability to absorb and digest an enormous amount of extremely diverse material in a short time was exceptional; and in a profession where quick minds are somewhat commonplace, his amazing rapidity was proverbial."

"May have been the last representative of a once-flourishing and numerous group, the great mathematicians who were equally at home in pure and applied mathematics and who throughout their careers maintained a steady production in both directions."

"Perhaps an even greater genius than Einstein, of almost extraterrestrial brilliance."

"However, as noted earlier, one of his central objectives—as a mathematician—was to publish the generalized proof of the fixed point theorem. Was the economics merely a convenient vehicle for an essentially mathematical exercise for von Neumann? Genius that he was, perhaps that is all that he wanted to do at that time. Later, after meeting Oscar Morgenstern, he returns to economics, but only through their joint interest in the theory of games."

"Von Neumann was a great mathematician and had the reputation at that time of being the cleverest man in the world. He was supposed to be the intellectual force driving the whole development of computers. He was a great thinker and a great entrepreneur."

"I remember a talk that Von Neumann gave at Princeton around 1950, describing the glorious future which he then saw for his computers. Most of the people that he hired for his computer project in the early days were meteorologists. Meteorology was the big thing on his horizon. He said, as soon as we have good computers, we shall be able to divide the phenomena of meteorology cleanly into two categories, the stable and the unstable. The unstable phenomena are those which are upset by small disturbances, the stable phenomena are those which are resilient to small disturbances. He said, as soon as we have some large computers working, the problems of meteorology will be solved. All processes that are stable we shall predict. All processes that are unstable we shall control. He imagined that we needed only to identify the points in space and time at which unstable processes originated, and then a few airplanes carrying smoke generators could fly to those points and introduce the appropriate small disturbances to make the unstable processes flip into the desired directions. A central committee of computer experts and meteorologists would tell the airplanes where to go in order to make sure that no rain would fall on the Fourth of July picnic. This was John von Neumann's dream. This, and the hydrogen bomb, were the main practical benefits which he saw arising from the development of computers."

"Von Neumann compensated for these superhuman abilities with an earthy sense of humor and tireless social life, and tried, with mixed success, to blend in on a normal human scale."

"I got to know von Neumann and I thought he was very quick mentally in mathematics and things."

"I think he was a damn fast guy for figuring out what the other guy was doing and explaining it better."

"Johnny has a very good mind."

"The Alexanders gave humdinger, wonderful parties. I don't know whether they would be regarded as outlandish today, but they were certainly regarded as far out in those days. The phenomenal feature of von Neumann was that he could go to these parties and party and drink and whoop it up to the early hours of the morning, and then come in the next morning at 8:30, hold class, and give an absolutely lucid lecture. What happened is that some of the graduate students thought that the way to be like von Neumannn was to live like him, and they couldn't do it."

"Von Neumann was very impressive to talk with. He was very quick."

"In speed and understanding Von Neumann was certainly phenomenal. He could understand a proof even far from his own subject very fast. I remember once in Cambridge I told him a proof of interpolation that was not quite correct. By the time we met again I had a correct proof. Von Neumann told me, “Something seems to be wrong in that proof.” And it was really not his subject. He wasn’t that interested in it, but he was quite right."

"Our country’s greatest Jancsi."

"You know, Herb, Johnny can do calculations in his head ten times as fast as I can! And I can do them ten times as fast as you can, Herb, so you can see how impressive Johnny is!"

"He is really a professional, isn’t he!"

"Dr. von Neumann is one of the very few men about whom I have not heard a single critical remark. It is astonishing that so much equanimity and so much intelligence could be concentrated in a man of not extraordinary appearance."

"Johnny von Neumann was the greatest mathematician around."

"Finally there came in the mail an invitation from the Institute for Advanced Study: Einstein. . . von Neumann. . .Weyl. . . all these great minds!"

"At about that time Einstein had agreed to serve as a consultant to our group but did not want to travel to Washington. So there had to be a liaison person and I was given that opportunity. Since Einstein did not know me, there had to be someone to introduce us. It then happened that I was introduced to Einstein by John von Neumann, one of the most important mathematicians of all time, and who had also become a consultant to our group. It was a very great experience for a new Ph.D. to be introduced to Einstein by Von Neumann!"

"Von Neumann was one of the greatest geniuses that ever lived."

"[Addressing Albert Tucker] The story goes that von Neumann's parents had all been lawyers and they sort of hoped that Johnny would be a good, lawyer. When he was sixteen or so they sort of tolerated his fiddling around with chemistry and mathematics. Finally they found out he wanted to be a mathematician, or chemist, or some mixture. They were very upset. Well, their attitude was that it wasn't too bad if he was going to pe a good one. So they inquired around who the best mathematician in his part of the world was, and it turned out to be Siegel. They had lots of money, and they arranged for Siegel to talk to Johnny. Afterwards they asked him, "Well, do you think he has any potential?" He said, "He knows more mathematics than I do now.""

"Von Neumann was also a delight to be with. His brainpower stuck out in every direction."

"Intellectual brilliance."

"Von Neumann would engage in any subject you wanted to discuss and within five minutes be right at the heart of the issue, even when he started off by saying, “I can discuss that not prejudiced by any facts.”"

"The most outstanding and at the same time versatile mathematician in the world in the second quarter of the 20th century."

"Around 1922–23, being then professor at Marburg University, I received from Professor Erhard Schmidt, Berlin (on behalf of the Redaktion of the Mathematische Zeitschrift) a long manuscript of an author unknown to me, Johann von Neumann, with the title Die Axiomatisierung der Mengenlehre, this being his eventual doctor dissertation which appeared in the Zeitschrift only in 1928, (Vol. 27). I was asked to express my view since it seemed incomprehensible. I don’t maintain that I understood everything, but enough to see that this was an outstanding work and to recognize ex ungue leonem. While answering in this sense, I invited the young scholar to visit me (in Marburg) and discussed things with him, strongly advising him to prepare the ground for the understanding of so technical an essay by a more informal essay which should stress the new access to the problem and its fundamental consequences. He wrote such an essay under the title, Eine Axiomatisierung der Mengenlehre, and I published it in 1925 in the Journal für Mathematik (vol. 154) of which I was then Associate Editor."

"I will not attempt to describe John von Neumann's unique abilities, but only say a little about the impression he made on us. The most striking was the enormous speed with which his brain worked. One could believe he already knew beforehand everything one asked him about. A little story illustrates this. Stefan Bergman […] went around and posed a problem to people. If one approached it directly, it required some calculation and the summation of a geometric series. But if one gave it a suitable twist, the solution became immediately apparent. When von Neumann promptly gave the correct answer, Bergman said: "You are the first of those I have asked who did not sum the geometric series." "No!" answered von Neumann, "I summed it.""

"John von Neumann is a kind of legendary mind ... Many people say he's like one of the smartest humans ever."

"I never ceased to be fascinated by electronic computers, and I feel that I have been privileged in having been initiated so marvellously by the Master himself. His mathematical achievements are far too subtle and technical for me to understand or to describe, but I can attest to the strength of his brain because I once saw him, for a bet, drink sixteen martinis in a row and then be still on his feet and quite lucid, though somewhat pessimistic in his utterances."

"IQ tests for geniuses have not yet been constructed, because one cannot expect the IQ-specialists to be geniuses, but one must suspect that the scale continues upwards to giddy heights of ability. Most of those who have known the mathematician John von Neumann have felt as slow and stupid in his presence as the dunce with the top of the form."

"A more interesting activity during that time was my periodic contact with Albert Einstein, who, along with other prominent experts such as John von Neumann, served as a consultant for the High Explosive Division."

"[On Rayleigh–Taylor instability] So, Fermi said, "Let me make a model; I'll have a broad tongue which moves into the dense material; I'll have a narrow tongue that moves away from it, and I'll just solve this numerically." So, he did some of that, but he wasn't quite satisfied with the solution. One afternoon around 4:50 p.m., John von Neumann came by and saw what Fermi had on the blackboard and asked what he was doing. So, [[Enrico Fermi|Enrico] told him, and John von Neumann said, "That's very interesting." He came back about 15 minutes later and gave him the answer. Fermi leaned against his doorpost and told me, "You know, that man makes me feel I know no mathematics at all.""