[TUHS] Happy birthday, John von Neumann!

[TUHS] Happy birthday, John von Neumann!

[Dave Horsfall]

We gained John von Neumann on this day in 1903, and if you haven't heard 
of him then you are barely human...  As computer science goes, he's right 
up there with Alan Turing.  There is speculation that he knew of Babbage's 
work; see 
https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/10828/the-relation-between-babbage-and-von-neumann 
.

-- Dave

[TUHS] Happy birthday, John von Neumann!

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Dave Horsfall wrote on Thu, 28 Dec 2017 09:10:56 +1100 (EST):

>> We gained John von Neumann on this day in 1903, and if you haven't heard
>> of him then you are barely human...

John (Johnny to his English-speaking friends) von Neumann was a
colossal figure in 20th Century mathematics and physics with a
photographic memory, an ability to work on several jobs at once, a
passion for partying, and a broad range of research publication in
computer science, economics, game theory, mathematics, probability,
and physics.

There are several books about him that I've found enjoyable reading.
He is included with all of the other major quantum pioneers in the
BibNet Project bibliography archive at

	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/bibnet/authors/v/von-neumann-john.bib

[change .bib to .html for a similar view in a Web browser, but with
live hyperlinks].

Those bibliographies strive to offer complete coverage of all known
publications by their subject scientists, as well as coverage of
publications about them, and their works.

Reports of bibliographic omissions are always welcome, and updates
will be made in short order.  In the case of von Neumann, there are
likely numerous still-classified reports of his work in the Manhattan
Project, the post-WW-II effort to build the hydrogen bomb, and his
consulting with numerous government and military agencies, that remain
unknown and unavailable.  [In the case of Alan Turing, some of his
classified war-time work has finally been released to the public, and
every such known instance has been included in his bibliography.]

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm.org  beebe at computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[TUHS] Happy birthday, John von Neumann!

[Nemo]

On 27/12/2017, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote (in part):
> We gained John von Neumann on this day in 1903, and if you haven't heard
> of him then you are barely human...  As computer science goes, he's right
> up there with Alan Turing.  There is speculation that he knew of Babbage's
> work;
> --
> Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will
> suffer."

This does not answer the potential Babbage connection but I ran across
the following paragraph by Dyson ("A Walk through Johnny von Neumann's
Garden" from here http://www.ams.org/notices/201302/index.html):

"I got to know Johnny personally when I came
to the Institute for Advanced Study in 1948. He
was then actively engaged in building the institute
computer and learning how to use it. He under-
stood from the beginning that two of the most
important uses of the machine would be to predict
weather and to model climate. He hired engineers
to build the machine and meteorologists to use
it. The chief engineer was Julian Bigelow, and the
chief meteorologist was Jules Charney. Each of
them had a gang of young people to do the heavy
work, persuading a totally new kind of machine to
produce some real science. I enjoyed very much the
young people, with their rowdy conversation and
irreverent behavior. There was an amusing clash
of cultures between these young hooligans and the
older members of the institute. As Einstein wrote
to his friend the queen of the Belgians when he
arrived at the institute in 1933, Princeton was a
quaint and ceremonious village populated by demi-
gods on stilts. The culture of the older members
was based on formal politeness and respect for
the academic hierarchy. Johnny and I were on the
side of the hooligans."

N.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, John von Neumann!

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Thursday, 28 December 2017 at  9:10:56 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> We gained John von Neumann on this day in 1903, ...

If you're in to this sort of thing, it's interesting to note that it's
also Linus Torvalds' birthday (66 years younger than John).

Greg
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[TUHS] Happy birthday, John von Neumann!

[Ian Zimmerman]

On 2017-12-28 09:10, Dave Horsfall wrote:

> We gained John von Neumann on this day in 1903, and if you haven't
> heard of him then you are barely human...  As computer science goes,
> he's right up there with Alan Turing.  There is speculation that he
> knew of Babbage's work

And those like me who are Masters Of No Trade know that he started as a
pure maths person, inventing the encoding of ordered pairs and ordinal
numbers in formalized set theory.

-- 
Please don't Cc: me privately on mailing lists and Usenet,
if you also post the followup to the list or newsgroup.
To reply privately _only_ on Usenet, fetch the TXT record for the domain.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, John von Neumann!

[Lawrence Stewart]

I would recommend https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/3972 <https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/3972>
which is the Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument, which describes the IAS machine.

> On 2017, Dec 27, at 5:10 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> 
> We gained John von Neumann on this day in 1903, and if you haven't heard of him then you are barely human...  As computer science goes, he's right up there with Alan Turing.  There is speculation that he knew of Babbage's work; see https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/10828/the-relation-between-babbage-and-von-neumann .
> 
> -- 
> Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

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[TUHS] Happy birthday, John von Neumann!

[Nemo Nusquam]

On 12/27/17 17:10, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> We gained John von Neumann on this day in 1903, and if you haven't 
> heard of him then you are barely human...  As computer science goes, 
> he's right up there with Alan Turing.  There is speculation that he 
> knew of Babbage's work; see 
> https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/10828/the-relation-between-babbage-and-von-neumann 
> .
Coincidentally, I ran across my copy of Goldstine, "The computer from 
Pascal to von Neumann", as I was cleaning up, and plan to reread in the 
coming weeks.  Short of checking the references in von Neumann's  
papers, I would think something would in there.

N.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, John von Neumann!

[Dave Horsfall]

We gained John von Neumann on this day in 1903, and if you haven't heard 
of him then you are barely human...  As computer science goes, he's right 
up there with Alan Turing.  There is speculation that he knew of Babbage's 
work; see 
https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/10828/the-relation-between-babbage-and-von-neumann .

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."