In almost every sphere of scientific inquiry – physics, biology, maths, economics, the social sciences, computing – you find von Neumann’s fingerprints. There is a Wikipedia page of “List of things named after John von Neumann.” Were it not for him, our understanding of the world would be decades behind where it is.
What created this genius? Bhattacharya does not speculate a great deal, but there are things worth considering. First, simple genetics: his family was high-achieving. His father was a doctor of law and an economic adviser to the Hungarian government; his uneducated maternal grandfather apparently could “add or multiply numbers into the millions” in his head instantly, a trick von Neumann emulated. The family was “puzzled” by their son’s inability to play the piano properly at the age of five, suggesting rather higher expectations than most. But it turned out to be because he “had taken to propping up books on his music stand so he could read while ‘practising’”.
He also grew up in a fertile environment. Around the turn of the 20th century, the Budapest Jewish community of which he was part produced an astonishing number of great thinkers. Near-contemporaries included Dennis Gabor, “who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1971 for inventing the hologram”; Theodore von Kármán, after whom the “Kármán line” is named, denoting the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and space; and Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, and Leo Szilard, three of the greatest minds behind the Manhattan Project. The atomic bomb has been described as a “Hungarian high school science fair project”.
The Hungarians who worked on America’s atomic weapons programme in the Thirties and Forties were known as “the Martians” by the other physicists – the joke being that the only way of explaining them was that super-intelligent aliens must have come to Budapest in the late 19th century and had babies with the locals. Von Neumann was the most alien of the lot.
But there was some accident of history that meant that European university departments at that time were disproportionately Jewish, and Belle Epoque Budapest, which was going through a less than usually antisemitic period, had a large and well-integrated Jewish population. Von Neumann himself speculated that insecurity drove this Jewish success – they recognised that Hungary’s tolerance might evaporate at any moment, and that they faced “the necessity to produce the unusual or face extinction”.
The tolerance did evaporate, in Hungary and elsewhere. Von Neumann, along with Teller, Wigner and the rest, had already left for Princeton, but Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany devastated their universities: 15% of physicists and 19% of mathematicians were dismissed, including 20 who had won or would win Nobel prizes.
Ironically, this may have lost Germany the war: analysis suggests that the loss of Jewish scientists damaged German science for decades. Werner Heisenberg, a German quantum physicist, was branded a “white Jew” for believing in Einstein’s theories, despite being a nationalist. He later said that it was not worth Germany pursuing nuclear weapons, because they wouldn’t be ready in time to affect the war: he believed this because he thought Germany’s nuclear research was well ahead of other nations. “As it was,” says Bhattacharya. “Until 1933.”
So von Neumann, along with Wigner and others, ended up in Princeton — and then at the next-door Institute for Advanced Study, a sort of intellectual all-star team, where great brains were enticed from around the world with vast salaries, no undergrads to teach, and the promise that they could just think big thoughts. Einstein was there, along with Gödel, Robert Oppenheimer, Freeman Dyson, Ulam, and a host of others. It was an environment made for a certain kind of hard-to-pigeonhole genius, able to wander from subject to subject simply by walking around campus, surrounded by brilliant weirdos.
Von Neumann is compelling evidence, I think, that individual genius is important and influential. Yes, he worked in a series of collaborations; yes, he built on the work of others. But he seems to have pushed on, or sometimes simply created, entire subfields of science, into areas that no one else realised could exist. The economist Oskar Morgernstern remembers him rapidly devising utility theory, immediately overturning economic orthodoxy: “But didn’t anyone see that?”, von Neumann asked.
It’s fashionable to say that intelligence isn’t real, or that we can’t define it, or that it’s a Western colonial construct. But the word points to a real thing: there is some quality which rocks don’t have, and which mice have a bit of, and which chimpanzees have more of, and humans have a lot of; and which is something like problem-solving ability or ability to achieve goals. Calling it intelligence seems as good as anything. It is this ability which has allowed humanity to shape the world, and it is this ability that some people – von Neumann among them – seem to have in unusually large measure.
Via scientific and technological progress, intelligence has made human life better. But in itself, intelligence is morally neutral: it can serve any end, good or ill, to which it is put. Von Neumann is a case in point. He developed computers partly to better predict the behaviour of explosive shockwaves and ballistic shells; he designed two different kinds of nuclear weapon, including the plutonium implosion bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki; his game-theoretic ideas led him to suggest using atom bombs in a first strike on Russia, and he was part of the inspiration for Doctor Strangelove. He believed that all this was in the interest of America, his adopted country, and no doubt of humanity; but not everyone would agree with him. First and foremost he wanted to solve puzzles.
I put the book down wondering if it is still possible to encourage and harness genius. Perhaps it’s as simple as putting lots of clever people together and letting them think weird thoughts — and Von Neumann and his colleagues were often weird people. Or perhaps it is a true accident, and the only lesson is randomness. Perhaps the proposed new field of research into “progress studies” will yield some ideas as to how to recreate that environment in which Von Neumann and his fellow weirdos flourished.
I wondered, too, if John von Neumann was well enough to understand the P vs NP puzzle when he received that letter from Gödel. For it is a wonderful metaphor for genius. I can dimly understand, for instance, Turing’s solution to the “Halting Problem”, or Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, or Russell’s set paradox that undermined mathematics. (They’re all based on the “liar paradox” – the statement “this statement is a lie”, which is false if true or true if false.) But it often takes no great brilliance to understand an idea once it has been brought forth: checking the Sudoku solution is relatively straightforward. Finding that idea in the space of possible ideas, though — solving the great sprawling Sudokus of science and maths, as Von Neumann did time and again, that takes genius.
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