I feel like trying to extract a trend here might be overstating the case a bit. It is important to remember that many European intellectuals, such as Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, James Franck, Emilio Segrè, Maria Goeppert-Mayer etc, fled to the US due to the rise of fascism in Europe.
On the European side, it was one of the greatest acts of self-sabotage seen at a civilizational scale. At the American end, it was a boon. There were more Noble prize winners hanging around coffee machines than you could shake a stick at.
The analysis fails to account for this; for e.g. they weren't intelligent just because they were of jewish heritage. They fled because they were intelligent and jewish. And those who didn't flee were killed. Is it any wonder that a list of fleeing European geniuses that the US govt. allowed entry into the States is dominated by jewish geniuses?
Out of this list, the only anomaly that truly stands out, and is perhaps the reason why the term "The Martians" was coined is John von Neumann. Quoting from a prior comment,
It is difficult to overstate just how smart and well rounded von Neumann was. Most contemporary accounts are from the outside looking in, but his mind was truly extraordinary. He wasn't just a genius in one capacity, but he was a genius in every capacity. It is tempting to think of him as a savant, but he was far from it. He was social, brilliant, artistic, ethically considerate, and gifted in every sense of the word. His mind is the kind of mind that comes along only once in a millennia. And it becomes more and more obvious the closer you get to him.
One of the best memoirs I've read is that of Marina Whitman née von Neumann, his daughter. It is her memoir, with her memories and her extraordinary life and career. But her genesis was this extraordinary being. von Neumann doted on her. He loved her and tried to fulfil the whole of her extraordinary being and train her gifted mind. The result was a woman who became an extraordinarily perceptive economist who helped guide some of the economic policy of the United States. In a way, this wasn't unexpected, as she was, of course, von Neumann's bridge to the future.
I would like to avoid reducing her story to him, but she offers a unique, familial glimpse into his mind. The early parts of her book deal with her father, and talk about his extraordinary mind. It's genuinely hard to capture the true dimensions of his mental prowess. And it's harder to capture the fact that he knew it and he tried to do his best to live up to it. That's what's so special about von Neumann. He wasn't just the greatest mind of the past millennia in sheer intellectual throughput and ability; he was a mind willing to make sacrifices to leave the Earth better than he found it. As his daughter puts it,
> Were it not for his oft-repeated conviction that everyone—man or woman—had a moral obligation to make full use of her or his intellectual capacities, I might not have pushed myself to such a level of academic achievement or set my sights on a lifelong professional commitment at a time when society made it difficult for a woman to combine a career with family obligations.
and,
> But my father's intellectual appetite was by no means narrowly confined to mathematics, and his passion for learning lasted all his life. He was multilingual at an early age; and until his final days, he could quote from memory Goethe in German, Voltaire in French, and Thucydides in Greek. His knowledge of Byzantine history, acquired entirely through recreational reading, equaled that of many academic specialists. My mother used to say, only half jokingly, that one of the reasons she divorced him was his penchant for spending hours reading one of the tomes of an enormous German encyclopedia in the bathroom. Because his banker father felt that he needed to bolster his study of mathematics with more practical training, Johnny completed a degree in chemical engineering at the Eidgennossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, at the same time that he received a PhD in mathematics from the University of Budapest, both at age twenty-two.
He became cynical over time. She describes his deep pessimism of humanity; something compounded by The Bomb. But then again who hasn't become a pessimist with time? He still tried to fix humans and give them things that would help move them forward. And yes, I'm talking about him separately from the rest of humanity, because his mind was profoundly different from the rest of humanity. As the article quotes Hans Bethe's famous saying, "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man." He was The Martian.
I don't wish to spoil the book for those who'd like to read it, but the prologue is heart wrenching. He died far too young. I can't imagine what he might have transformed had he lived into his nineties and hundreds.
> The more important consideration, though, was national security. Given the top secret nature of my father's involvements, absolute privacy was essential when, in the early stages of his hospitalization, various top-ranking members of the military-industrial establishment sat at his bedside to pick his brain before it was too late. Vince Ford, an Air Force colonel who had been closely involved in the supersecret development of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), along with General Bernard Schriever and my father, was assigned as his full-time aide. Eight airmen, all with top secret clearance, rotated around the clock. Their job was both to attend to my father's everyday needs and, in the later stages of his illness, to assure that, affected by medication or the advancing cancer, he did not inadvertently blurt out military secrets.
And this, the saddest part,
> After only a few minutes, my father made what seemed to be a very peculiar and frightening request from a man who was widely regarded as one of the greatest—if not the greatest—mathematician of the twentieth century. He wanted me to give him two numbers, like seven and six or ten and three, and ask him to tell me their sum. For as long as I could remember, I had always known that my father's major source of self-regard, what he felt to be the very essence of his being, was his incredible mental capacity. In this late stage of his illness, he must have been aware that this capacity was deteriorating rapidly, and the panic that caused was worse than any physical pain. In demanding that I test him on these elementary sums, he was seeking reassurance that at least a small fragment of his intellectual powers remained.
> I could only choke out a couple of these pairs of numbers and then, without even registering his answers, fled the room in tears. Months earlier we had talked, with a candor rare for the time, about the fact that, at a shockingly young age and in the midst of an extraordinarily productive life, he was going to die. But that was still a father-daughter discussion, with him in the dominant role. This sudden, humiliating role reversal compounded both his pain and mine. After that, my father spoke very little or not at all, although the doctors couldn't offer any physical reason for his retreat into silence. My own explanation was that the sheer horror of experiencing the deterioration of his mental powers at the age of fifty-three was too much for him to bear. Added to this pain, I feared, was my apparent betrayal of his dreams for his only child, his link to the future which was being denied to him.
Whitman, Marina. The Martian's Daughter (p. 3). University of Michigan Press. Kindle Edition.
On a more shameless note, I'm compiling this as a part of my Project Karl. It's one of those books that I think everyone should know about and read, but few do. https://www.projectkarl.com
I do think someone European geniuses like Heisenberg were destroyed by WWII instead of enlivened by it, working on the German nuclear project they didn't want nor think they could succeed in, and surrounded by comparatively few other geniuses.
One of the early arguments for a first strike was the ability to target military installations only.
Due to the limitations in early US targeting ability, a US counter strike likely meant having to go with a counter-value response instead of a counter-force one. Meaning bigger targets like cities over smaller military-only targets.
So if you worked under the presumption that war with the Soviets was inevitable, a first strike avoided mass casualties in the magnitude of 10s of millions in favor of decapitating military targets.
So yes, there is a logical argument that it would be the more ethical choice.
It wasn't until the 80's with advances in both surveying/geodesy (predicting precise ballistic trajectories taking into account local variances in gravity) and targeting/ delivery accuracy (B-1, B-2, peacekeeper ICBMs, and better SLBMs) that the game-theory changed.
That's just not realistic. The Soviet army relied on its productive capabilities to wage war. Without destroying cities, nuclear war with the USSR would simply be absurd.
Beyond that, American intelligence in the USSR was weak, and they wouldn't have been able to pin down high value military targets. They'd also have serious issues striking deep within the USSR.
Von Neumann also recommended that Kyoto, instead of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, be nuked, despite it having very little military significance and leading to many more deaths.
By the time he started proposing a strike of the USSR, the USSR had already started deploying early warning radar, jet interceptors and even guided missile systems designed specifically to stop B-29s carryig nuclear bombs. In testing they proved to be even more effective than needed to completely protect the installations they were defending against slow and heavy bombers. A strike in 1951 would have been a total disaster and would have not at all stopped their industry. The US didn't even know where they were making bombs.
His political views were that coexistence with the USSR was impossible. As it turns out, the USSR had no plans of invading the US, he was simply wrong.
Let's not try to whitewash history. Neumann knew that Soviet intelligence and counter intelligence was formidable. He knew that the strength of the Soviet military was in its cities . He had already recommended nuclear strikes on civilian population centers with low military value. He was noted by his fellow physicists to be unperturbed by his work. It's quite unlikely that he had any illusions about what as needed to actually stop the Soviet war machine.
He thought that the Soviet Union could coexist with the US. He was violent in his hatred of the Soviets and was militaristic. He thought that the US had to defeat the Soviets sooner than later. Surely we both realize that this means millions of dead.
That's what you're doing by discounting what was a fairly popular political opinion of the time.
>That's just not realistic. The Soviet army relied on its productive capabilities to wage war.
None of that matters if you get hit with a Soviet first strike.
The main goal wasn't to take out the conventional war machine, but the Soviet Nuclear capabilities. Counter force vs counter value.
And this was before "Spheres of Influence" was accepted as a realistic possibility on either side, when the admitted Soviet policy was that communism had to be spread worldwide, even if it came to instigating war. So a first strike wasn't just thought possible, but expected.
>That's what you're doing by discounting what was a fairly popular political opinion of the time.
Yes, the US in the 1950s had a fairly high amount of absolutely insane but fairly popular political opinions. For example numerous generals were advocating massive nuclear strikes on North Korea and the dissemination of radioactive material on the border with China. That doesn't even begin to excuse anyone.
>None of that matters if you get hit with a Soviet first strike.
>The main goal wasn't to take out the conventional war machine, but the Soviet Nuclear capabilities. Counter force vs counter value.
The USSR had no ability to deal a debilitating first strike to the US.
>And this was before "Spheres of Influence" was accepted as a realistic possibility on either side, when the admitted Soviet policy was that communism had to be spread worldwide, even if it came to instigating war. So a first strike wasn't just thought possible, but expected.
This is nothing less than complete historical revisionism. By the 1920's the dogma of "socialism in one country" was official Soviet policy under Stalin. Anyone that disagreed that socialism only had to be realized in the USSR was contradicting the party line and subject to be purged at any moment. To be sure, the USSR still supported communist parties around the world, but it explicitly eschewed the invasion of countries to install communism, instead it would only be done if it was necessary to protect Soviet socialism.
The idea that communism had to be instigated by war around the world was Trotsky and co doctrine of "permanent revolution". Notably, the first was exiled and assassinated. This doctrine while in the early days relatively popular in the Party never came close to being the official position of the party.
IIRC the quote I've seen on HN, it wasn't "nuke USSR as soon as possible", but more like "given that you already want to nuke Moscow tomorrow, why not do it today?".
That was not his reason, as I stated in another comment. You're free to educate yourself about his thoughts on the matter, which would be much more productive than a snarky comment.
I have already. I don't believe what he said publicly. I see no reason why I would have to. He was noted to be much more cruel and unconcerned with the destructive power of the nuclear bomb than his peers and recommended the nuking of civilian targets. He spoke of the necessity to destroy the USSR on ideological grounds. The idea that a preemptive strike would be limited against a nuclearly armed country is preposterous and ridiculous, and he had already suggested nuking for population destruction instead of military use.
Yes, but due to ethical considerations. One doesn't have to agree with the outcome of his reasoning, but it's well established that his reasons were ethical, not cynical or egoistic.
He was convinced that without an American preemptive strike, even more would die. He was wrong of course, as we now know, but it wasn't clear at that time.
There's an episode of Hardcore History on this topic, I think the title was "Destroyer of Worlds".
It was pretty clear at the time that the Soviets had no intention or capability to destroy the US in such a way that the US would not able to respond with a nuclear strike.
He was noted by his colleagues to be exceptionally unperturbed by his work. He recommended that the US strike Kyoto despite having no military significance to speak of.
He himself admitted that he was ideologically violently opposed to the existence of the USSR. It's clear that his motives were not about minimizing death and destruction.
I don't think you can overdo it when it comes to Jansci
“There was a seminar for advanced students in Zürich that I was teaching and von Neumann was in the class. I came to a certain theorem, and I said it is not proved and it may be difficult. von Neumann didn’t say anything but after five minutes he raised his hand. When I called on him he went to the blackboard and proceeded to write down the proof. After that I was afraid of von Neumann” — George Pólya
“von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us.” — Edward Teller
...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 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.” — Enrico Fermi
”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, so you can see how impressive Johnny is” — Enrico Fermi again
“One had the impression of a perfect instrument whose gears were machined to mesh accurately to a thousandth of an inch.” — Eugene Wigner
How does this tell us something about the last 1000 years? You want to call him the smartest man of the 20th century sure go ahead, but you hardly have any idea about the other 9 centuries.
Can you point to anyone like him in the recorded history of the last thousand years? There may well be some whose lives were unrecorded or of whom the records were lost.
Gauss far exceeded von neuman in mathematical impact and pushing math forward. So did many other mathematicians that were contemporaries of von neuman. The same for physics. Von Neuman would not even be in the list of top 10 mathematicians in the 20th Century, let alone of all time. The twentieth century had giants like Kolmogorov, Hilbert, Grothendieck, none of whom were smarter than von neumann, but they made far greater discoveries.
But this just shows that when you are talking about impact as opposed to intelligence, a lot of things other than IQ come into play. I am certain von neumann was much smarter than Gauss, but Gauss had an instinct for discovery that was remarkable. Newton is another example -- someone not nearly as brilliant as Von Neuman (my impression) but had an incredibly deep insight and much bigger impact. They say that Feynman's IQ was ~120, which would certainly be lower than von neuman, but he made a much bigger impact as well.
I wouldn’t go far as to say Von Neumann was smarter than Grothendieck. I think they’re both different types of geniuses, where their genius manifest in different ways. Grothendieck was a genius in working with extremely deep abstractions, I’d say he eclipses Von Neumann in this way, whereas Von Neumann had a different type of genius in which he eclipsed others at. In Grothendieck’s case he was a profound genius, who made profound impacts in mathematics.
Another mathematician that reminds me of Von Neumann is Euler. He also memorized long passages and could do complicated calculations in his head quickly.
A quote on Euler from wikipedia:
“He was able to, for example, repeat the Aeneid of Virgil from beginning to end without hesitation, and for every page in the edition he could indicate which line was the first and which was the last even decades after having read it”
>I wouldn’t go far as to say Von Neumann was smarter than Grothendieck
He famously recounted his inability to derive Heron's formula for the area of a triangle when he was a teenager (despite realizing that such a formula ought to exist via conceptual reasoning), and seems to have subsequently kept an unbalanced set of talents in the same vein.
Grothendieck was the best in class at abstract mathematical reasoning and some regard him as the best mathematician in the 20th century. The Heron Formula or “prime” example doesn’t negate that
His wikipedia page goes into more detail on that front. Considered the top mathematician of his time (with also major contributions to physics and computer science), other world-class mathematicians and physicists being in awe of his abilities, sometimes solving (never before answered) math problems easily, being able to recite word-for-word the books and articles he read, years after reading them, simultaneously translating them as necessary, etc.
Maybe Newton was on the same level? Or Gauss? Or Leonardo?
Or maybe not.
There have probably been dozens of people in the past millennium who had the potential to develop that kind of mind, but most of them probably lived and died without the opportunity to develop their gifts, whether because of enslavement, rural poverty, or lack of access to education.
On the European side, it was one of the greatest acts of self-sabotage seen at a civilizational scale. At the American end, it was a boon. There were more Noble prize winners hanging around coffee machines than you could shake a stick at.
The analysis fails to account for this; for e.g. they weren't intelligent just because they were of jewish heritage. They fled because they were intelligent and jewish. And those who didn't flee were killed. Is it any wonder that a list of fleeing European geniuses that the US govt. allowed entry into the States is dominated by jewish geniuses?
Out of this list, the only anomaly that truly stands out, and is perhaps the reason why the term "The Martians" was coined is John von Neumann. Quoting from a prior comment,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25455028
It is difficult to overstate just how smart and well rounded von Neumann was. Most contemporary accounts are from the outside looking in, but his mind was truly extraordinary. He wasn't just a genius in one capacity, but he was a genius in every capacity. It is tempting to think of him as a savant, but he was far from it. He was social, brilliant, artistic, ethically considerate, and gifted in every sense of the word. His mind is the kind of mind that comes along only once in a millennia. And it becomes more and more obvious the closer you get to him.
One of the best memoirs I've read is that of Marina Whitman née von Neumann, his daughter. It is her memoir, with her memories and her extraordinary life and career. But her genesis was this extraordinary being. von Neumann doted on her. He loved her and tried to fulfil the whole of her extraordinary being and train her gifted mind. The result was a woman who became an extraordinarily perceptive economist who helped guide some of the economic policy of the United States. In a way, this wasn't unexpected, as she was, of course, von Neumann's bridge to the future.
I would like to avoid reducing her story to him, but she offers a unique, familial glimpse into his mind. The early parts of her book deal with her father, and talk about his extraordinary mind. It's genuinely hard to capture the true dimensions of his mental prowess. And it's harder to capture the fact that he knew it and he tried to do his best to live up to it. That's what's so special about von Neumann. He wasn't just the greatest mind of the past millennia in sheer intellectual throughput and ability; he was a mind willing to make sacrifices to leave the Earth better than he found it. As his daughter puts it,
> Were it not for his oft-repeated conviction that everyone—man or woman—had a moral obligation to make full use of her or his intellectual capacities, I might not have pushed myself to such a level of academic achievement or set my sights on a lifelong professional commitment at a time when society made it difficult for a woman to combine a career with family obligations.
and,
> But my father's intellectual appetite was by no means narrowly confined to mathematics, and his passion for learning lasted all his life. He was multilingual at an early age; and until his final days, he could quote from memory Goethe in German, Voltaire in French, and Thucydides in Greek. His knowledge of Byzantine history, acquired entirely through recreational reading, equaled that of many academic specialists. My mother used to say, only half jokingly, that one of the reasons she divorced him was his penchant for spending hours reading one of the tomes of an enormous German encyclopedia in the bathroom. Because his banker father felt that he needed to bolster his study of mathematics with more practical training, Johnny completed a degree in chemical engineering at the Eidgennossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, at the same time that he received a PhD in mathematics from the University of Budapest, both at age twenty-two.
He became cynical over time. She describes his deep pessimism of humanity; something compounded by The Bomb. But then again who hasn't become a pessimist with time? He still tried to fix humans and give them things that would help move them forward. And yes, I'm talking about him separately from the rest of humanity, because his mind was profoundly different from the rest of humanity. As the article quotes Hans Bethe's famous saying, "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man." He was The Martian.
I don't wish to spoil the book for those who'd like to read it, but the prologue is heart wrenching. He died far too young. I can't imagine what he might have transformed had he lived into his nineties and hundreds.
> The more important consideration, though, was national security. Given the top secret nature of my father's involvements, absolute privacy was essential when, in the early stages of his hospitalization, various top-ranking members of the military-industrial establishment sat at his bedside to pick his brain before it was too late. Vince Ford, an Air Force colonel who had been closely involved in the supersecret development of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), along with General Bernard Schriever and my father, was assigned as his full-time aide. Eight airmen, all with top secret clearance, rotated around the clock. Their job was both to attend to my father's everyday needs and, in the later stages of his illness, to assure that, affected by medication or the advancing cancer, he did not inadvertently blurt out military secrets.
And this, the saddest part,
> After only a few minutes, my father made what seemed to be a very peculiar and frightening request from a man who was widely regarded as one of the greatest—if not the greatest—mathematician of the twentieth century. He wanted me to give him two numbers, like seven and six or ten and three, and ask him to tell me their sum. For as long as I could remember, I had always known that my father's major source of self-regard, what he felt to be the very essence of his being, was his incredible mental capacity. In this late stage of his illness, he must have been aware that this capacity was deteriorating rapidly, and the panic that caused was worse than any physical pain. In demanding that I test him on these elementary sums, he was seeking reassurance that at least a small fragment of his intellectual powers remained.
> I could only choke out a couple of these pairs of numbers and then, without even registering his answers, fled the room in tears. Months earlier we had talked, with a candor rare for the time, about the fact that, at a shockingly young age and in the midst of an extraordinarily productive life, he was going to die. But that was still a father-daughter discussion, with him in the dominant role. This sudden, humiliating role reversal compounded both his pain and mine. After that, my father spoke very little or not at all, although the doctors couldn't offer any physical reason for his retreat into silence. My own explanation was that the sheer horror of experiencing the deterioration of his mental powers at the age of fifty-three was too much for him to bear. Added to this pain, I feared, was my apparent betrayal of his dreams for his only child, his link to the future which was being denied to him.
Whitman, Marina. The Martian's Daughter (p. 3). University of Michigan Press. Kindle Edition.
https://www.amazon.com/Martians-Daughter-Memoir-Marina-Whitm...
On a more shameless note, I'm compiling this as a part of my Project Karl. It's one of those books that I think everyone should know about and read, but few do. https://www.projectkarl.com