YouSaid · the spoken record

Ananyo Bhattacharya

lines on the record: 52
first: 2022-05-11
most recent: 2022-05-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“We probably all want to go out on something of a high and not go out in abject terror. So yeah, you know, read about this incredible human being, but don't try to draw too many life lessons from it, I think.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would just rush off cocktail in hand to write down some theorem. I mean, what do you draw, what kind of lessons do you draw from that? The only lesson I draw is that just don't do that. Try and forge some sort of work schedule that kind of works for you. We can't all be superhuman. And as we see, his relationships, his human relationships suffered. you know, deeply troubled as he went out at the close of his life as cancer was eroding his mental capabilities. I mean, he kind of rediscovered Catholicism. He'd converted when he was younger, but he had this, he was overtaken by this. fear of mortality and I think when we think about a productive life I think”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's dangerous trying to come out with a kind of self-help book based on von Neumann's lifestyle, right? I mean, his first wife left him because he was too busy thinking. And she took up with essentially a graduate student, Horna Cooper, who was a physics graduate student. And she was quite the thinker herself. She ended up becoming this mover and shaker in science admin. And, you know, his second wife was very clever herself, Clara Dan. But he thought incessantly from morning to night. And even at the cocktail parties that he threw, he would sometimes just find noise conducive to work.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not at all, but I would thoroughly recommend if you're going to write a book that you try not to give up your day job a year before the worst pandemic descends that we've known about for decades, descends on and engulfs the planet, thus ensuring that instead of working on your book about the cleverest person of the 20th century who works on a set theory, you end up having to homeschool a recalcitrant 10-year-old. So that's one, you know, if you want to be productive, don't do that. But in other terms, I think, you know,”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think as you would expect, quite a complex and thoughtful human being, and he's not easily characterized as Dr. Strange Love or a bleeding heart liberal.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And years later when Mandelbro ran into problems with his boss, he goes looking for work elsewhere and he finds that like whatever a decade earlier, long after, you know, and this is long after von Neumann was dead, you know, von Neumann had sent out letters and talked to people say, you know, Mandelborough is doing really important work, but he may struggle because what he's doing is so cutting edge. So if he does and he go comes looking for a job, please give him a job because this guy's brilliant. And he does these little things and he of course helps scientists leave kind of Europe before the Nazis make that impossible. He helps to get girdle out of Germany for example. So he's this very conflicted personality.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was superficially he was kind of a good man and he was nice to people. And I think that's really where he started. In his day-to-day interactions with people, he was nice. He would do these incredible things very quietly behind people's backs that many other scientists wouldn't dream of. Like, you know, this builder, Hungarian builder, contacted him in the middle of the Second World War and said, I want to learn more about maths, but I'm in America basically building stuff. Where do I find out more about math? So he writes to his friend in wartime Hungary and gets them to send over a bunch of Hungarian math textbooks. And later on you've got people like Mandelborough who came over thanks to his reference and he was a Princeton and the...”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maintain their lead as kind of the preeminent. But so he was kind of I think more allergic to authoritarianism, whereas I think Before the Second World War happened and before we knew what was happening under Stalin, there were many intellectuals who were willing to give the communism deep left thinking more of a chance. Whereas von Neumann had kind of seen what that turned into in Hungary and he'd seen that essentially it became a kind of authoritarian regime. He was deeply suspicious of Stalin from day one for the very same reason and he'd had these experiences of Europe being turned upside down by the Nazis. And I think that really shaped him very profoundly. He became quite cynical about human nature as well at the same time, I think deep down.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of during the Second World War and post the Second World War from the 30s, late 30s onwards that America became this scientific and technological kind of powerhouse really. And it benefited from many of these European scientists who left as a result of the Nazis. Now he'd seen this and his lesson was that authoritarianism is something that we shouldn't tolerate. And so when he came to the States, his priority was to put his expertise into the hands of the Democratic government there. And whilst he definitely was advising them, He got the feeling that he wasn't interested in making decisions on their behalf because this was a democratically elected government. I think deep down he was a Democrat. He felt he should work as hard as possible to give the US government the tools that it needed to overcome the Nazis and to”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were kind of protected from this, but von Neumann saw all of this as he was growing up. And then, of course, later with the rise of the Nazis in Germany, he had left Germany by then, but a lot of his formative years as a scientist or as a mathematician were spent in Germany and he adored kind of interwar Germany at least in the late 20s. And for him it was this perfect intellectual climate. And you have to remember that Germany was scientifically and mathematically, definitely kind of the center of the world then. I mean, America just was nothing at the time. It was only...”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a shortly after the First World War in Hungary, there were two things that happened. One was there was a very short-lived communist uprising, and that government lasted for six months, and it was pretty brutal. They reclaimed private property from wealthy families. And there was just general chaos and beatings on the street and stuff. Something happened afterwards and a military essentially a military government just marched in led by General Horthy. And they took control. And that turned out to be even worse. I mean, there was public hangings and rapes and thousands of people ended up dead. And many Jewish people. People at that time were seen to have been collaborating with the earlier communist government. So many Jews were basically shot on the streets as well. Now, the von Neumann's were”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, I think that's fair. In fact, if anything, he was considered kind of right-wing or at least a Cold War hawk in certain circles. I think if you look at him quite closely, I mean, you could argue in many ways he was, you know, something of a liberal. But at the time, a lot of people felt that he was quite hawkish. Now, the reason for that is that”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should they fire at what point should they do this? And so he got kind of involved in that and computing. And he kind of lost interest in game theory again as soon as computing came to the fore. So he helped. So whilst he was doing this, he ended up helping Rand realize their own ambitions of having a computer. So it's not at all clear to me how much he'd still carry on being involved in the strategy in the nuclear strategy side. But of course, I mean, this idea of kind of if you are coming up with your best strategy, then you have to think what your opponent will make of that and you have to imagine that they're also... So an intelligent opponent who's going to be out for themselves. And that thinking is very deeply embedded into Minimax. And that was clearly very influential later on.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, von Neumann, I mean, he was recruited by Rand, but the work that he did, and Rand became this kind of hothouse for nuclear strategic thinking, right, in the Cold War. And it influenced American policy. But von Neumann, apart from this paper on nuclear strategy, he seems to have taken remarkable little interest in the whole thing. I mean, when he was at RAND, he was computing various solutions to kind of duels. And so he was busy, well, if you have a plane and a, I don't know, a tank or whatever submarine and a ship, you know, and they can see each other coming at what point.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the late 40s in this brief window after the Second World War when the US seemed to have a virtual monopoly on nuclear weapons and you find suddenly that a lot more people supported this idea including a large proportion by the way of the American public then you think is possible.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To think in this kind of rather kind of ruthless manner about, well, maybe bombing the Soviet Union and wiping out 100,000 people's lives at the push of a button. Maybe that's not as bad as it could be when you consider that millions of people are going to be dead in a decade and potentially bringing all of human civilization to an abrupt end. Well, maybe we can stop that from happening. And it turns out that it's a surprisingly common idea at the time in America and elsewhere. I mean, Bertrand Russell, for example, the famous pacifist, also argued for a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union if they didn't give up their nuclear ambitions. And you dig around in the post-”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or whether the United States functions as a de facto guardian of nuclear technology, you know, it wasn't clear. I think the other thing that I sort of say in my book is I try to lay out the context of this. I mean, this was after the most destructive war that the world had ever known. Millions of people had died. And von Neumann had predicted this and the Holocaust very successfully years in advance and he now”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not entirely clear that he meant that in all seriousness, I mean, his daughter certainly thinks he was advocating for a pre-emptive strike, or at least he was asking people to think quite rationally about whether a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union might be worthwhile, given that he felt that it was almost inevitable Stalin, as soon as he developed nuclear weapons, would launch a kind of strike on the United States. He was sort of arguing, well, for in this situation where we're thinking about it, why shouldn't we do it sooner rather than later? And shouldn't we do it before the Soviet Union has enough weapons that they can fight back? And shouldn't we do something to ensure that nuclear power doesn't get into the wrong hands? And whether that's a world government.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was deeply uncomfortable with this idea that we had two or more sides with enough nuclear weapons to wipe out the world many times over. So he thought that if nuclear weapons ever were used, you would have to be insane to just go all out. So he talked about kind of holding back. And you toss it, if one person tosses a nuclear weapon over and blows up a city, then the other person does. And it proceeds a little bit more slowly. It doesn't escalate all at once into this massive catastrophic nuclear war. But the thing that people picked up most about his thinking was, of course, in this brief period after the Second World War, where he famously said, if you say bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today, if you say four o'clock, why not two o'clock?”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was quite important, and it's been weirdly overlooked when it came to kind of this caricature of von Neumann that developed as a result of Kubrick using him as one inspiration for doctor Strangel later on. Now von Neumann's actual thoughts on nuclear strategy, he penned a paper in the fifties before he died. In that he makes it clear that he doesn't, he's not really talking about this, the idea of a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union anymore. It's a lot more complicated. It's more like what evolved at Rand later.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that kind of doesn't chime well, really, with this idea of von Neumann viewing the world in the zero-sum terms, right? He came from this rather central European background where they were used to discussing ideas and kind of bars and cafes over a drink and talking about stuff quite freely and sharing and giving credit to others when it's due. And so, I mean, obviously proud of his own contributions and he was quite defensive about them, but he was also reasonably honest. If he had culled an idea from somebody else, he would totally be honest about that and give them credit. And so this kind of thread of thinking, I think, was”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, a game theory was based around increasing numbers of these kind of alliances. So if you wanted to know about a templay game, von Neumann tried to kind of think about how within this templay group you could get different alliances that were kind of stable and would lead to a winning solution. And it took John Forbes Nash later on to kind of develop this idea of non-cooperative game theory, which was hugely successful.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was like were there stable solutions to games if a number of the players cooperated? And was this an optimal solution to the game? So you could imagine, say if you play, I don't know, monopoly, and there's three of you. Often what you'll notice is one player will start winning and then the two other players, even without talking to each other, they'll sort of gang up on them, right? They'll form a kind of alliance. And a kind of von Neumann's early”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean so it's not at all clear right that von Neumann thought about nuclear strategy in kind of minimax terms a zero sum game in fact there's quite a lot of evidence that he didn't I mean his He, for example, took very little interest in the prisoner's dilemma that wasn't cooked up by him, it was cooked up by people at Rand who were kind of inspired and influenced by him. And of course prisoner's dilemma isn't a zero-sum game. It's a non-zero sum game. But it became this template with which many people thought about nuclear strategy in the Cold War. Now, if you look at what von Neumann wrote in theory of games and economic behavior with Morgenstern, what he was concerned with, his kind of solutions were based around cooperation. So”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The theory of games, which is really about conflict and cooperation. And I think that was kind of his motivation there. And again, you've got the very... Thing that some pure mathematicians would say, oh yeah, you know, von Neumann was wasting his time by being so involved with military work or this practical stuff he was whizzing about. Know without that part of his personality, would he have been so interested in game theory? Would he have done, would he have achieved what he did in those terms, which is recasting economics in a completely different light, really.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“humans have invented that underpins our technological world. We don't really think of it like that often and with von Neumann as I was writing about von Neumann it became impossible not to right so take game theory What was he trying to do there? Well this was rooted again in this very early 20th century idea amongst mathematicians that maths was extraordinarily successful so we can apply it to kind of anything and you know why should we leave the human mind and human behavior to psychologists when they've been so terribly unsuccessful and actually getting anywhere with understanding it let's uh let's try to do the maths on this and so kind of that I think it's that impetus that really drove a lot of mathematicians including von Neumann to tackle”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the fecundity really of the idea more than the mathematics, isn't it? It just you know that somebody can take this question that philosophers have been kicking around for sort of centuries, can machines make more machines? Can machines have babies? Can machines reproduce? And he just says, yeah, well, let's look at this mathematically, shall we? And then he solves it. And, you know, we have the answer. And that's what I find gripping about von Neumann's work. And it's kind of what I found overall as I was approaching this book that I wanted to show that people, when you look at kind of popular science books or popular mathematics books, the majority of them are really about kind of celebrating the maths or the science in and of itself. They rarely actually talk about maths as this kind of existential thing that”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, that's one way it could go. Let's hope it doesn't go that way. You know, maybe they'll build us a new home after we've trashed this one. Who knows? Yeah, I think, of course, these sorts of science fiction-y elements, maybe part of it. Is that nobody wants to talk about automata theory because it's got these unsavoury science fiction elements attached to it people would rather stick to the von Neumann architecture and all that sort of stuff But yeah, I mean”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most of its parts, you know, I talk to the inventor of that and he said he was inspired by this idea of von Neumann's idea. In the 50s and 60s and 70s you had people thinking about, well, how do we explore the universe? Well, why don't we make a probe that can make more copies of itself out in space by foraging on the planets it finds? It's this incredibly fertile idea and I think we're still just at the beginning of really working out where this goes and it's kind of dangerous and it's kind of exciting and who knows where it's going to end.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of a neural net. So artificial intelligence. And here we are, you know, all of von Neumann's little influences coming together in this neat package. I think maybe in another 10 years time we'll be asking the same question again. Why didn't anybody realize this stuff was important? I mean, when von Neumann's first biographer, Norman McCrae, wrote about automatic theory, who is extremely dismissive, barely gave it a few pages as if it's something quirky. And now we're beginning to see kind of the influence of this extraordinarily powerful idea, if nothing else. We know that it inspired those early pioneers in nanotechnology to think about universal constructors at the molecular level. We know that rep, this idea of a 3D printer where you could”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And these are kind of stem cells and they sort of whirl around and collect other stem cells together in little groups. And then these stem cells themselves start to whirl around and collect more together. They suddenly realize, wow, this is the embodiment of von Neumann's self-reproducing automata. And it's only taken what 70 years for them to make an appearance. And these stem cells were designed by”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, that's fascinating, isn't it? Because the book's called The Man from the Future, right? And I loved von Neumann's proof of his automata theory, his proof that automata could reproduce. And he combines Turing's universal computer with this idea of a construction unit and so he produces the universal constructor, right? And I think in a sense this is an idea that still kind of ahead of its time. And just after I published The Man from the Future in the UK, this group in the States, this published their paper on Xenobots.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He'd written three volumes worth of operator theory. And he always joked, right, that a mathematician's productive years are over at 30 or at 28. And it was always 10 years away from however old he was at the time. He clearly felt that he had a lot more to do. And I think that's what made his kind of untimely death all the more tragic for everybody. But it was incredibly painful for him. Nobody enjoys staring death in the face, but von Neumann, it was extraordinarily painful.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, he spent a lot of time at the IAS going for nice walks with Einstein and chatting to von Neumann. But of course, there wasn't much coming out there in comparison. Now, when you look at von Neumann's productivity at the IAS, I mean, he was inventing whole new fields of mathematics. bringing about the birth of the modern computer you know he had this project at the IAS to bring a computer to them against you know it has to be said against the wishes of many of the IAS staff but”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know what? I don't know. And maybe you've looked at his publication record more closely than I have and counted up the papers. But whilst Einstein, for example, and Kurt Gerdell, when they were placed into this perfect environment that was the Institute for Advanced Study, right, they didn't have to teach anybody anything, they had massive holidays. They could do what they wanted. Well, Einstein's time there was really not very productive. He had his miracle year, right, in the kind of early 20th century, which was incredible. But then his time at the IAS was not particularly productive. He was trying to find his theory of everything. And Girdle, after this incredible work in Europe on his incompleteness theorem.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Left alone or didn't engage with the sort of problems that he did, whether it was the computer or to his military work, that he would have left behind the kind of interesting erva that he did. He wouldn't have been von Neumann, right? I mean, it's so deeply ingrained in his personality to be out there thinking all the time and to be thinking about key problems that it's difficult to imagine of von Neumann that wasn't like that, that was tucked away. And I think that as a kind of intellectual biographer, that makes him kind of incredibly interesting, but also incredibly challenging to tackle.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That led him to think and be in a position to kind of spur computing and as I argue he was kind of a godfather of the open source movement his proof of That automata could reproduce themselves and evolve all of this thinking came about because he was, I think, deeply engaged with the real world. And that makes him unusual. And he argues as much quite openly in an essay that he did called the mathematician, and where he says that if mathematicians retreat too far kind of into their ivory towers, if the maths becomes just maths for the sake of maths with no input from kind of the real world, then he said it became Baroque and not interesting. So I find it really difficult to believe that if von Neumann had sheltered himself away and somehow been”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I'd get a Brunowski thought, you know, the von Neumann had kind of wasted his incredible talent. But to me, the more I looked at his work, the more I realized that for him, this engagement with the real world was actually vitally important. And need not have been the work for the military, but that is where at the time in the unfortunately, in the early to mid-20th century, a lot of the challenging problems were. I mean, designing the atom bomb, which is where he made some key contributions. And then later on, of course, the emergence of the computer is deeply, deeply linked to the mathematics of the atom atom ball. And arguably, you know, it was his engagement with these areas.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But, you know, Wolfram was born in the wrong time, I think. Perhaps if he'd have been born in 1903, he might have been a von Neumannesque figure. So there's definitely a combination there of good luck, a historical moment. And just a particular attitude, maybe because he was brought up in by a bank of father who was not afraid to get his hands dirty. I mean, this was an investment banker happily investing in firms, in technology firms of the time. People, he invested in Jacquard Loom company, which used punch cards to programs. That made an impact on von Neumann, obviously, at the time. So I think, yeah, there's a... Combination of reasons that von Neumann was so influential.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many mathematicians, many academics of all sorts actually would rather eschew the real world. They don't want very much to do with it. When it comes to mathematicians, they'd rather be left alone in their ivory tower to prove theorems. And von Neumann did a lot of that. He left behind a massive amount of pure mathematics. But really my book focuses on the stuff that he left behind that came about from engaging with the real world and there's a huge amount of that. And I think that's also what made him really quite exceptional. The only other person that I can think of that was that is now as gifted mathematically as he was and has shown some interest in these sort of practical affairs is Stephen Wolfram.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time when one genius of von Neumann's stature could contribute so productively to kind of everything from pure mathematics right the way through quantum mechanics to various fields of physics to non-linear equations to distill out the modern form of the computer, the programmable computer to automata theory come up with a proof that machines could reproduce themselves. I think sadly that was really a brief moment of the 20th century that made it possible. But the second thing that's incredibly rare about von Neumann that I noticed, he actually embraced this idea of applying maths to real world problems”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Paradoxes, and that would lead later on that step by step thinking would be extremely influential when people came to think about programming and algorithms and things like that. So there's that side of things. And then, of course, science just explodes. masses of funding, of course, quantum mechanics becomes the atom bomb, basically, within a space of 25 years. You have huge amounts of money suddenly being thrown at science, and then you get big science. And, you know, economics, thanks to von Neumann in large part, becomes suddenly more mathematical. But now with that massive funding and the continued funding of science, I think there's been a great degree of specialism.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a few other pure mathematicians who could maybe match von Neumann's sort of brain. I mean, it was extraordinarily unusual, but maybe not, you know, once in a century unusual, but extremely unusual. But I think there were a few things that kind of mark him out. One is, yeah, the historical moment, so he arrives on the scene in kind of, you know, 1910, 1920s. And he's immersed in kind of a maths that's going through this logical crisis and it's going to spur people like Alan Turing and Kurt Goodell to think really hard about these step-by-step proofs. How do we prove stuff properly without getting into these awful power?”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think you've really hit the nail on the head there. I think there was definitely a historical moment. I mean, in terms of people with brains like Von Neumann, they're pretty hard to think of. But, you know, in terms of raw mathematical ability, you look at somebody like Terence Tau today, or you consider”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Particularly successful. He had started his own very successful business. But what was interesting was that he had these calculational abilities that were actually better than von Neumann. So von Neumann remembers asking his granddad these incredibly long sums and his granddad would come back with answers pretty quickly. Von Neumann, despite all of his genius, he was never able to kind of match these abilities himself. And of course, there's a lot more to higher mathematics, as we know, than being able to do really long sums. But it's kind of interesting that there's some genetic predisposition there that we can see.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean he was renowned as a mathematician really early on. I mean as soon as he finished his PhD where he resolves this incredibly difficult paradox in set theory or helps to resolve it by twenty two and then he goes to Gertigen where quantum theory is being invented by another WizKid actually Werner Heisenberg of course who's just a year older than von Neumann and von Neumann gets really interested in quantum mechanics and he produces this first mathematically rigorous version of it a few years later so I mean von Neumann clearly I mean he was just an exceptional he had an exceptional brain now his grandfather was apparently although he wasn't academically”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me arrange special tutoring for him so von Neumann gets picked out even from this group of exceptional people and he's given a special course at the University of Budapest and his teachers are all just amazed at his abilities so the joke was later on when all these guys met again at Los Alamos to work on the American bomb project that they had these funny Hungarian accents and they had these almost supernatural intellectual abilities so the joke was they must be from another planet now when Wigner was asked about this he said there is no Hungarian phenomenon the only phenomenon that needs explaining is Johnny von Neumann so you can you can tell from those sorts of comments what kind of person he was”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he is very acutely aware of this. Of course, there are circumstances around Budapest at the time which meant that geniuses of this sort were nurtured. So there were private schools and they were all inevitably private schools and they were almost all boy schools as well. And von Neumann went to one of three, I think, elite schools in Budapest at the time. Teller, for example, and Wigner and Zillard are all part of these Martians, part of this group called the Martians later. They all went to these kind of elite schools. And von Neumann was spotted quite early on by his maths teacher who told his father, you know, your boy's exceptional lens.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so they were all Jewish and von Neumann attributed this kind of pressure to succeed to growing up in kind of Central Europe between the two world wars, being surrounded by sort of anti-Semitism. Now Budapest was relatively tolerant, but it was in the air of Central Europe at the time. And he said that he felt a pressure to succeed or face extinction. I mean, they were constantly under this huge relentless kind of psychological pressure to kind of do the impossible. And, you know, von Neumann in his letters from 1930, by which time he safely in the US, he's predicting disaster. He's predict. Pretty accurately that there will be a Second World War, and he predicts that European Jews will face extinction.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Among geniuses as he would be later on at Los Alamos, for example, or at the Princeton and at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he'd be recruited along with Einstein, that he was kind of a cut above even all of these incredibly clever people. And so, yeah, so he grows up in this quite privileged Buddhapest surroundings. Their home was often visited by the greats of the time. It was an incredibly cultured city and his father Max was a kind of successful banker. So they were quite wealthy. I mean, he was a self-made man. But he had, as a result, von Neumann, who was one of three brothers actually, who was the eldest. He had the benefits of kind of a top-flight education as well.”
2022-05-11 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source