Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War

The conversation opens with a short teaser about von Neumann's expectations after the Second World War, then the host introduces his guest, Ananyo Bhattacharya, a science writer who has worked at The Economist and Nature and is the author of The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann. The host asks for a summary of von Neumann's life, and Bhattacharya concedes at the outset that this is not an easy task.

Bhattacharya's answer starts with the childhood evidence. Von Neumann was born in Budapest around 1903 into a wealthy Jewish family, and his family noticed early that he was special. By six he could carry out long six-figure calculations in his head, by eight he had learned calculus, and he was teaching himself the finer points of set theory. Around eleven he was taking long walks with Eugene Wigner, a childhood friend who was a year older and later won a Nobel prize, and he was teaching Wigner set theory. Bhattacharya's inference is that even among the geniuses he later joined at Los Alamos, at Princeton and at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he was recruited along with Einstein, von Neumann was a cut above.

The background was privileged. His home was visited by the great figures of the time in a highly cultured city, and his father Max was a self-made, successful banker. Von Neumann was the eldest of three brothers and, as a result of the family's wealth, received a top-flight education.

The host then gives a personal measure of the legacy. Looking back over his computer science degree, he found that a large share of it traced to von Neumann: algorithms, linear programming and merge sort, which he puts at probably a quarter of his curriculum, plus density matrices and von Neumann entropy in quantum computing, the von Neumann architecture, game theory in an organizational ethics class, finite state machines and cellular automata. His estimate is that this one person accounts for probably a third of what he learned in college.

The host raises the group known as the Martians, Hungarian and Central European Jews who migrated to the United States in the early twentieth century, and cites a Scott Alexander blog post suggesting the atomic bomb was a high school science project for a bunch of Hungarians, since several of the scientists attended the same high school. Bhattacharya's first answer is psychological. The group was Jewish, and von Neumann attributed the pressure to succeed to growing up in Central Europe between the wars, surrounded by antisemitism. Budapest was relatively tolerant, but the attitude was in the air, and von Neumann said he felt he had to succeed or face extinction, under constant, relentless psychological pressure to do the impossible.

Bhattacharya offers a concrete data point for how acutely von Neumann understood this. In letters from 1930, when he was already safely in the United States, von Neumann was predicting disaster: quite accurately, a second world war, and extinction for European Jews.

Circumstances in Budapest also mattered. Bhattacharya describes private schools, almost all of them boys' schools, and says von Neumann went to one of what he thinks were three elite schools there. Teller, Wigner and Szilard, all part of the Martians, attended such schools. Von Neumann's maths teacher spotted him early and told his father that the boy was exceptional and that he wanted to arrange special tutoring. So even in a group of exceptional people he was picked out, and he was given a special course at the University of Budapest, where his teachers were amazed at his abilities.

The Los Alamos joke, as Bhattacharya tells it, followed from the group's funny Hungarian accents and almost supernatural intellectual abilities: they must be from another planet. When Wigner was asked about this, he gave a reply that Bhattacharya says reveals what kind of person von Neumann was:

there is no hungarian phenomenon the only phenomenon that needs explaining is johnny von neumann