Talk:John von Neumann

Contradictions
The article currently has two section that contradicts each other: Career and private life and Personality. First one says Klara and John von Neumann were socially active within the local academic community. His white clapboard house at 26 Westcott Road was one of Princeton's largest private residences. He always wore formal suits, including a three-piece pinstripe while riding down the Grand Canyon astride a mule. Von Neumann held a lifelong passion for ancient history and was renowned for his historical knowledge. He enjoyed Yiddish and "off-color" humor (especially limericks). He was a non-smoker. In Princeton, he received complaints for playing extremely loud German march music on his phonograph. Von Neumann did some of his best work in noisy, chaotic environments, including with his wife's phonograph playing loudly. Per Churchill Eisenhart, von Neumann could attend parties until the early hours of the morning and then deliver a lucid lecture at 8:30., the latter - Gian-Carlo Rota wrote in his controversial book, Indiscrete Thoughts, that von Neumann was a lonely man who had trouble relating to others except on a strictly formal level. Françoise Ulam described how she never saw von Neumann in anything but a formal suit and tie. His daughter wrote in her memoirs that he was very concerned with his legacy in two aspects: her life and the durability of his intellectual contributions to the world. Even from a young age he was somewhat emotionally distant, and some women felt that he was lacking curiosity in subjective and personal feelings. Despite this, the person he confided to most was his mother.

I think that's a clear contradiction - a person who frequently attended parties, was married twice, had friends, etc, is hardly "a lonely man who had trouble relating to others except on a strictly formal level". That seems to be only Rota's opinion, with no other examples.

If there are no objections, I'll trim Personality section and merge the remains to Career and private life. Artem.G (talk) 07:26, 9 October 2023 (UTC)


 * Before trying to rewrite these sections, if possible you may want to try reading the cited sources directly (or the cited sources from the version of this article as of a few weeks ago, if some have since been cut), to make sure whatever version you end up with accords with the tone / general impression given in those. There's been a lot of chopping of this article in the recent past, including a lot of removal of supporting detail and anecdotes. –jacobolus (t) 12:32, 9 October 2023 (UTC)


 * I checked Rota's book; it's not von Neuman bio, and it says just Von Neumann was a lonely man with serious personal problems. His first wife ran away with a graduate student. He had trouble relating to others except on a strictly formal level. Whoever spoke to him noticed a certain aloofness, a distance that would never be bridged. He was always formally dressed in impeccable business suits, and he always kept his jacket on (even on horseback), as if to shield himself from the world. I read several biographies and articles about von Neuman, and I can't remeber other people telling the same. I removed this part, feel free to revert, though I doubt that such anecdotes are valuable for the article. Artem.G (talk) 17:21, 10 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Rota was an undergraduate at Princeton while Von Neumann was a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study, and it's not clear to me how much direct contact they had. So this is more like "observations / second-hand gossip of a ~20-year-old student about one of the local peak-career giants". Seems fair to heavily discount. –jacobolus (t) 17:46, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

"Mathematical style" section seems to be misnamed and lump unrelated topics together
What would be a good section to put material about areas of mathematics that von Neumann did or didn't have experience/engagement with? This doesn't really seem like it is about his "Mathematical style", or even about (the higher-level section) "Personality". Perhaps it could go at the end of the top-level "Mathematics" section

I think there's probably more interesting things that could be said about (and there are surely secondary sources describing) his style per se, whether problem-solving approaches, lectures, or writing style in books and papers. –jacobolus (t) –jacobolus (t) 22:40, 12 October 2023 (UTC)


 * I went ahead and did some reorganization. Can we come up with a better name for the top-level section than "Personality"? I don't think it very well describes the content. –jacobolus (t) 02:43, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

Issues with nuclear weapons / mutually assured destruction section
I'm copying this section of the GAR discussion above down to here so it doesn't get lost in the fray. Hopefully you don't mind Chipmunkdavis. –jacobolus (t) 17:32, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

Before I noted a few issues in climate change, you [jacobolus] now mention the "parts about nuclear weapons", and the Mutual assured destruction subsection there is another example of the issues in the article, so a good one to drill down on. I haven't said anything about quotes from top scientists so I'm not sure where those questions arise, most of the hagiography (the exaggerating/idealizing of his life) comes through in peacocky writing (like the all A's except when they weren't framing). In this subsection the second sentence is "He also "moved heaven and earth" to bring MAD about", a quite flowery description, and the section frames the whole program as his personal goal, directly contrasting him 1:1 with the entire Soviet Union. (While here, "that they could deliver to the USSR" needs rewording.) This is followed up by the eyebrow-raising claim von Neumann planted people in the CIA, whether you think misinformation is hyperbolic this is wrong. "an ICBM was the ne plus ultra of weapons" is a flowery addition which seems to serve no purpose than to associate von Neumann with a latin phrase? The bulleted pointed list (this should be summarized in prose) of actions von Neumann personally took includes "he promoted the development of a compact H-bomb which could fit in an ICBM", which does not feel remotely notable or unique. (The third bullet is similarly weak.) The one sentence paragraph after that frames von Neumann's views as one man against the general feeling of the time, another obviously hagiographic framing.

These are all issues that come through in reading only the prose of that subsection. Checking the source (which I've now found the relevant pages of), they become even more concerning. The "moved heaven and earth" quote, even if it wasn't flowery, does not appear to be in the book (not turning up in the gbooks search at any rate). Most of the views framed as von Neumann's particular thinking are outputs and conclusions of a panel he led. What is provided as his personal thoughts are the missile gap and the inadequacy of bombers, but these are not presented as him against the general thought but against "some people". The "proven correct in the Sputnik crisis" framing is flatly contradicted by the source, which notes Sputnik was "much less importantly, although more dramatically" relevant than ICBM tests and intelligence gained from German scientists who had worked for the USSR. The source even notes that the crisis was when "Americans were fearful of a missile gap that had actually closed two years earlier" (emphasis mine). The CIA plant claim is about a period when von Neumann was working for the CIA. The individuals he "planted" were colleagues who participated in different CIA projects and reported to him. This is just one subsection, and is not simply a copyediting issue (although that would help). CMD (talk) 04:28, 26 October 2023 (UTC)


 * Okay, great, thanks for being specific. I don't have any particular expertise about MAD or nuclear war, and don't have the bandwidth to tackle this anytime in the next few days, but this kind of substantive content review is something that is of practical value, that other editors can either work on or at least concretely respond to. –jacobolus (t) 05:34, 26 October 2023 (UTC)
 * The concept predates von Neumann (our article on it even gives an example from Wilkie Collins, better known for The Moonstone). The term postdates him . I've snipped out that subsection. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 23:44, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Misleading statement
" Unable to accept his impending death,[82] Von Neumann was given last rites by Father Strittmatter before dying." This falsely implies a cause and effect relationship between his inability to accept death and his decision to receive last rites. He converted to Catholicism earlier, and so the last rites would be given regardless of his view of death.77Mike77 (talk) 15:19, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

en.excessively-techni-pedia.org
"Later, von Neumann suggested a new method of linear programming, using the homogeneous linear system of Paul Gordan (1873), which was later popularized by Karmarkar's algorithm. Von Neumann's method used a pivoting algorithm between simplices, with the pivoting decision determined by a nonnegative least squares subproblem with a convexity constraint (projecting the zero-vector onto the convex hull of the active simplex). Von Neumann's algorithm was the first interior point method of linear programming"

It's stuff like this that reminds me that I don't know why I bother reading these articles.

80.71.142.35 (talk) 17:46, 15 March 2024 (UTC)


 * How fortunate that no one forces you to do so. Favonian (talk) 18:20, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
 * If you can come up with an accurate summary which is more accessible that would be a welcome improvement. But notice from the previous paragraph that "von Neumann provided an hourlong lecture" about related topics to explain something to another expert. It's going to be tough to duplicate that, plus prerequisites back to some arbitrary point, in the space of a paragraph or two. Readers who don't know what linear programming is (and related other jargon terms used here) should probably just skim past this paragraph, taking away a message like «Von Neumann made some advances in optimization algorithms using his cutting-edge understanding of linear algebra»; but notice this version is vague to the point of meaningless; the more detailed version gives some idea to people who do know about these topics what Von Neumann's specific contributions were about. A curious reader such as yourself can click through a wikilink to linear programming or Karmarkar's algorithm to try to make more sense of it, if you want to. –jacobolus (t) 19:35, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

"never appeared"
The article says "he would send a preprint of his article containing both results, which never appeared". Does that mean that they never appeared in a printed publication? Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 05:01, 10 June 2024 (UTC)