2013/01/31 by Freeman J. Dyson · 1 citation
Computer Science · Mathematics · #History of Computing Technologies #Mathematics #Pure mathematics #Von Neumann architecture
paper · pdf · doi:10.1090/noti942
openalex publication_date 2013/01/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
Johnny von Neumann left behind him six massive volumes of collected works, assembled and edited by Abraham Taub [1]. The collected works are his garden, containing a large and heterogeneous set of objects that he planted. Each of them grew from a seed, from an idea or a problem that came into his head. He developed the idea or solved the problem and then wrote it down and published it. He wrote fast and published fast, so that the flowers are still fresh. For my talk this morning I decided to take a walk through the garden and see what I could find. Luckily only two of the papers are in Hungarian. He wrote mostly in German until he came to live permanently in the United States at the age of thirty, and after that in English. Johnny was educated at the famous Lutheran High School in Budapest from age ten to age eighteen. There he had excellent teachers and even more excellent schoolmates. One of the schoolmates was Eugene Wigner, who became an outstanding physicist and a lifelong friend. But Johnny’s father understood that the Lutheran High School was not giving Johnny everything he needed. Johnny had a passion for mathematics going far beyond what the school could teach. So his father hired Michael Fekete, a mathematician from the University of Budapest, to work with Johnny at home. The first flower in Johnny’s garden is a paper, “On the position of zeroes of certain minimum polynomials ” [2], published jointly by Fekete and von Neumann when Johnny was