John von Neumann was smarter than the smartest. Hans Bethe, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics, remarked: “I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann’s does not indicate a species superior to that of man.” He had a profound impact on quantum mechanics, the atomic bomb, the modern computer, game theory, and self-replicating machines. The basis for all these contributions was his exceptional understanding of mathematics. Growing up in Budapest, Johnny, or Jancsi, as he was called, could reportedly multiply two eight-digit numbers together in his head when he was six! His well-off Jewish parents fostered an environment for learning. His father, Max, an economic adviser to the Hungarian government, hosted intellectual dinners that greatly influenced young Johnny The “von” was added to their surname after the Austro-Hungarian Emperor elevated Max to nobility. Although times were good, Max felt they wouldn’t last. As anti-Semitism spread through Europe in the early 20th century, Max wanted to prepare his three sons in case they needed to move. So, Johnny studied French, Italian, English, Ancient Greek, and Latin. But his greatest strength lay in mathematics. Soon after enrolling in an elite prep school, his math teacher Gábor Szego was brought to tears after their first meeting, as he had never experienced a mind like Johnny’s. Lutheran school, Fasori Gimnázium But Max didn’t want his son studying math at university, believing, “Mathematics does not make money.” So a compromise of sorts was struck. Johnny studied chemistry at the University of Berlin for two years before enrolling at ETH Zurich, where he earned his chemical engineering degree. At the same time, he completed his PhD in mathematics at the University of Budapest, where he wrote his thesis on set theory. Set theory is the study of sets, which are collections of objects, including numbers. They form the fundamental building blocks of mathematics. Ananyo Bhattacharya, author of the biography The Man From the Future, uses a great example to explain set theory: Imagine building a tower with Lego bricks. The 1st level has a single brick representing the empty set, the foundation of all sets. The 2nd level includes the brick from the 1st level and adds another brick, representing the set containing the empty set. The 3rd level builds on the previous two levels and adds another brick to represent a new set containing these sets. After completing his formal education, Johnny headed to Göttingen, Germany, the center of the math world, to study under the esteemed David Hilbert. At the time, scientists and mathematicians were trying to understand the strange behavior of particles at the smallest scales, like electrons. Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger came up with two different ways to describe how these particles behaved. Heinsenberg’s approach used a grid with columns and rows representing the different energy states of electrons. Schrödinger described particles as waves spread through space. Oddly, when these waves are observed, the wave function collapses, and they behave like particles. It was as if they were talking about two different things. Scientists like Paul Dirac had tried to prove that the two were the same, but were not entirely successful. Johnny was. He proved that the two were mathematically equivalent. Still in his early twenties, he was already regarded as a legend. He received an offer to lecture at the University of Berlin, where he enjoyed the cabaret shows as much as the academic work. His next stint at the University of Hamburg was also a short stay, as his chances of becoming a tenured professor were slim. Then came an invitation from America to become a visiting lecturer in mathematical physics at Princeton University. Oswald Veblen, a math professor at Princeton, wanted to entice Europe’s top talent with huge salaries, in some cases, offering more than seven times what they made in Germany. (In the case of Wigner) Germany was the leading scientific nation in the world, while the U.S. was considered second-rate and wanted to catch up. Before accepting the position at Princeton, he married Mariette Kövesi also from a prosperous Jewish family, whom he had known since childhood. Upon arriving in America with his wife in January 1930, Johnny quickly settled in. Though, he did face an unexpected problem when he tried to get a driver’s license. He failed his driving test so many times that he had to bribe an examiner to pass him. An intersection at Princeton University was nicknamed “von Neumannn corner” due to his frequent accidents there. He’d have to buy a new car every year after totaling the previous one, though was never seriously injured. He humorously explained his accidents this way: “I was proceeding down the road. The trees on the right were passing me in orderly fashion at 60 miles an hour. Suddenly one of them stepped in my path. Boom!” (page 66) Johnny picked a good time to leave Germany as the Nazi party was growing in popularity. In January 1933, Hitler rose to power and became Chancellor. Some lost half their staff overnight. German science never recovered. That same year, Johnny joined the recently formed Institute for Advanced Study, a research institute in Princeton, New Jersey, where the greatest scientific minds, including Einstein, were free to explore their ideas. He was the youngest recruit at 29 years old and was often mistaken for a grad student. One of his most significant contributions around this time was providing mathematical proof of the ergodic hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that a system will eventually explore and visit all the possible states it can occupy. Imagine gas in a box. Over time, the gas particles will spread out and fill every part of the box. This work was crucial for predicting the long-term behavior of physical systems. While working away at the IAS, his mind wandered as he was preoccupied with the looming war back home. He wrote to Hungarian physicist Rudolf Ortvay in 1935, “There will be a war in Europe in the next decade.” He was also correct when he predicted that America would enter the war if Great Britain were in trouble. He feared that European Jews would suffer a genocide similar to the Armenians under the Ottoman Empire. Johnny lobbied for America's involvement, writing to a congressman in September 1941, “The present war against Hitlerism is not a foreign war, since the principles for which it is being fought are common to all civilized mankind.” Between his preoccupation with his work and the inevitable war, Johnny wasn’t an attentive husband or father. His daughter Marina reflected in her memoirs: “Although he genuinely adored my mother, my father’s first love in life was thinking, a pursuit that occupied most of his waking hours, and, like many geniuses, he tended to be oblivious to the emotional needs of those around him.” He was surprised when his wife left him. A year after their divorce, he married Klára Dán, or Klari, in 1938, after meeting her at a casino in Monte Carlo earlier. She was also from a wealthy Jewish Budapest family and had left her husband for Johnny. They threw wild parties at their home every week, and Johnny, with his remarkable memory, amassed a vast collection of jokes to entertain their guests. At the start of the war, Johnny researched explosives and ballistics, determining how their shape affected their force and direction. His expertise led him to something far more catastrophic. In December 1938, German scientists discovered that uranium could be split. Physicist Enrico Fermi, who had fled fascist Italy, understood the significance, declaring: “A little bomb like that and it would all disappear.” Robert Oppenheimer, then at the University of California, Berkeley, led the secretive American effort to beat Germany to the bomb. Johnny played a key role in the Manhattan Project by perfecting the implosion device. He improved the arrangement of explosives for the “Fat Man” bomb by suggesting wedge-shaped charges around the plutonium core. When detonated simultaneously, these charges produced focused jets of energy, compressing the core more rapidly and uniformly than conventional explosives. The implosion had to be so symmetrical that it was compared to crushing a beer can without splattering any beer. Achieving this symmetry resulted in a powerful nuclear explosion. By the time the atomic bomb was fully developed and tested in July 1945, Germany had already surrendered. The war in Europe was over. But Japan refused to yield. Johnny had no qualms about bombing Japan as he feared the threat of Stalin’s Soviet Union and wanted America to send a strong message. He was part of the team that shortlisted the Japanese cities to drop bombs on. Despite his willingness to use the bomb, he was fully aware of the devastating power he had helped to create. “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 energy source which is now being made available will make scientists the most hated and also the most wanted citizens of any country.” On August 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped the "Little Boy” bomb on Hiroshima, killing 78,000 people instantly, with tens of thousands more dying later from radiation poisoning and burns. Three days later, American forces dropped the second bomb, "Fat Man," on Nagasaki. It used the implosion mechanism Johnny had developed, resulting in the deaths of 70,000 people. Japan surrendered unconditionally. Toward the end of the war, engineers at the University of Pennsylvania began working on a revolutionary machine known as the ENIAC. Initially designed to calculate artillery firing tables, ENIAC’s first task was determining whether it was possible to build a more powerful bomb. Referring to hydrogen bomb John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert created the world’s first programmable electronic computer for the U.S. Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory. Moore School of Electrical Engineering ENIAC, which took up an entire room, could perform more than 300 multiplications per second, which was thousands of times faster than its predecessors. Johnny joined the project as a consultant. But he wasn’t satisfied with a machine that could merely calculate. He envisioned computers that could store information and instructions in their memory, whereas the ENIAC required manual reconfiguration for each new task. Johnny played a key role in developing the ENIAC’s successor, the EDVAC, which introduced the concept of a stored-program computer. This design allowed data and instructions to be stored in memory and manipulated by the machine, a foundational concept of modern computing technology. The dissemination of Johnny’s 1945 report spread these revolutionary ideas. However, Eckert and Mauchly were furious that the report bearing only John von Neumann’s name had been shared before they could patent their digital computing device. Mathematician Herman Goldstine distributed the report to dozens of scientists and engineers to further the development of high-speed computers, as Johnny intended. Johny explained that “...this was perfectly proper and in the best interests of the United States.” His ideas from EDVAC guided the design of the IAS machine at the Institute for Advanced Study. IBM's first commercially successful electronic computer, the IBM 701, was based on Johny’s stored-program architecture. Leading a bitter Eckert to complain: “He sold all our ideas through the back door to IBM.” In a landmark verdict on October 19, 1973, a judge ruled that the basic concepts of the electronic digital computer were in the public domain and could not be patented. So, one of the most valuable inventions of the 20th century was declared public property, a significant step towards what would become the open-source movement. As if his schedule weren’t full enough, Johnny also developed game theory during the war years, desiring to find neat mathematical solutions to real-world problems at a tumultuous time in history. He explained to mathematician Jacob Bronowski during a London cab ride that game theory was different from chess: “Chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation.Real life is not like that. Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do. And that is what games are about in my theory.” as recounted in Bronowski’s “The Ascent of Man” Game theory encompasses various models, each addressing different decision-making scenarios. A classic example related to fair division is the cake-cutting problem. If two people share a cake, what’s the best way to ensure it’s divided fairly? One person cuts it, and the other chooses the first piece, ensuring a fair division since the cutter will aim to make both pieces equal. Another example is the zero-sum game known as “matching pennies.” In this game, each player has a penny and must secretly turn it to heads or tails, then reveal their choices simultaneously. If the pennies match, one player wins and keeps both pennies. If they don't match, the other player wins. This game illustrates that one player’s gain is exactly the other’s loss, making it a zero-sum game. Johnny viewed the Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. as two players in a zero-sum game. He supported the development of the hydrogen bomb, which was exponentially more powerful than the atomic bomb. Initially, he was a proponent of “preventive war” and recommended the U.S. launch a nuclear strike at Moscow, knowing it was only a matter of time before the Soviet Union became a nuclear power. Confident that the Russian spy network had obtained details of the atomic bomb design, he was convinced that war with the Soviet Union was inevitable. He recognized the urgency of the situation and remarked: “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?” However, he abandoned his idea of a pre-emptive strike once the Soviet Union had enough bombs to retaliate, leading to the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD). Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy the fear to attack. He is said to have inspired the character Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s film, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”. He used game theory to model the Cold War interaction, helping military strategists consider when they should and should not push the nuclear button. Ironically, Johnny defended Oppenheimer during secret hearings to determine whether he posed a security risk due to his close ties to those with Communist affiliations. Meanwhile, Johnny had pushed for a pre-emptive strike against the Communist Soviet Union. While Johnny’s mind was racing, his health was breaking down. Bone cancer metastasized through his body. It’s been suggested that the disease resulted from his radiation exposure when he witnessed the hydrogen bomb tests conducted in the Marshall Islands. Bikini Atoll Although Johnny believed that mathematicians typically did their best work by the age of 26, he produced some of his most unique contributions after his health declined. In his later years, he became fascinated by the concept of self-replicating machines. He theorized about machines that could reproduce themselves, with information copied and passed to offspring separately from the machine itself – a vision that anticipated the discovery of DNA's structure in 1953. His theories have profoundly influenced artificial intelligence, inspiring the development of systems that self-improve through training on data, as seen in machine learning algorithms and neural networks. John von Neumann’s ideas were far ahead of his time, but sadly, his life was cut short. He passed away on February 8, 1957, at the age of 53. Despite being agnostic all his life, on his deathbed, he converted to Catholicism. In a 1950s article for Fortune magazine, Johnny questioned the future of technology, recognizing its potential for good and evil. He wrote, "The problems of the future of humanity cannot be resolved by a single prescription, but only in reliance on day-to-day opportunistic measures, and reliance on the human qualities required: patience, flexibility, intelligence.” Despite his many contributions to math and science, John von Neumann was acutely aware of the gaps in education that could hinder future advancements. He once addressed a young man's question about whether America was educating enough people to operate advanced machines. Is there enough people to do it? I’m glad that you’re asking this question because it’s really a very good one. No, we don’t take enough people, and we better do something about it. And I hesitate to say that we better do something about it quickly, but rather, we’d better do something about it both quickly and then continuously. In other words, we need more training in science on all levels, in college, in the high schools, and more training of high school teachers. Well, one great way to learn STEM and bridge this gap is through Brilliant. Brilliant is an amazing platform for brushing up on your math skills, starting at your level and helping you advance—and it’s FREE for you to try out. Each lesson is filled with hands-on problem-solving that lets you play with concepts— which is way more effective than watching lecture videos. Brilliant recently launched a ton of new interactive content in AI and programming. Their “How LLMs Work” course gives you hands-on experience with language models and helps you understand how they generate text that's nearly indistinguishable from human writing. Brilliant’s “Programming with Python” is perfect for building a strong foundation in programming. You’ll start writing your own programs on day one, using their built-in drag-and-drop editor. There’s something for everyone no matter your area of interest in STEM. Brilliant is FREE for you to try out for 30 days. Just scan my custom QR code on your screen or click my custom link in the video description: brilliant.org/newsthink If you sign up with my code or link, you’ll receive a 20% discount on Brilliant’s annual Premium subscription, which gives you access to all of their interactive offerings. Thanks for watching. For Newsthink, I’m Cindy Pom.