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

I try to lay out the context of this.

I mean, this was after the most destructive war that the world had ever known.

Millions of people had died.

And von Neumann had predicted this and the Holocaust very successfully, years in advance.

And he now was convinced that within a decade, there would be a third world war with nuclear weapons. Okay, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Anunno Bhattacharya, who is a science writer who has worked at The Economist and at Nature.
And most recently, he's the author of The Man from the Future, The Visionary Life of John von Neumann. And it was an extremely enjoyable read, super interesting.
And so before we jump into the questions, I don't know, I'm wondering if you can kind of give context to my audience and summarize the life of this giant. Well, that's not an easy task, but I'll give it a go.
So he was born in Budapest in around 1903 to this wealthy Jewish family. And pretty early on, they realised that there's something quite special about him.
So he can do these long six figure calculations in his head by six. And he's learned calculus by eight right and he's teaching himself the finer points of set theory um by kind of 11 right so he's going on long walks with uh eugene wigner who is a childhood friend of his and a future nobel prize winner and wigner's a year older than him and he's teaching Wigner set theory at that age so it's it's kind of clear that even among geniuses as he would be later on at Los Alamos for example or at the Princeton and at the Institute for Advanced, where he'd be recruited along with Einstein,

that he was kind of a cut above even all of these incredibly clever people. And so he grows up in this quite privileged Budapest surroundings.
Their home was often visited by the greats of the time. It was an incredibly cultured city and his father, Max, was a kind of successful banker.
So they were quite wealthy. I mean, he was a self-made man.
But he had, as a result, von Neumann, who was one of three brothers, actually, is the eldest. He had the benefits of kind of a top flight education as well.
Yeah. So, you know, right before we did the interview, I was thinking about what, you know, I have a computer science degree and I was thinking about, okay, what portion of my computer science degree can be traced back directly to von Neumann?

I was just going through just like an initial glance at a few of the classes that I took where like a large part of the fraction of the content came from one moment, right?

So you could like, okay, algorithms, linear programming, you know, merge sort, like probably

like a quarter of my curriculum, quantum computing, you know, density, density matrices, von Neumann entropy, hardware, von Neumann, you know, the von Neumann architecture for the computers, you know, even like my organizational ethics class, you know, that game theory that comes up, you know, theory of computing, you know, finite state machines, cellular automata.

So, like, it's astounding to me that this person is responsible for probably like a third of everything I learned in college. And so it was very interesting to then get to read the history of this person and the ideas that he came up with and interacted with.
Now, one very interesting

part about the context surrounding von Neumann's work is, you know, he was part of this group, as you talk about, called the Martians. They were Hungarian and Central European Jews who migrated to the United States in the early 20th century.
And Scott Alexander has a fun blog post title about this. He says the nuclear bomb was a high school science project for a bunch of Hungarians because a lot of the scientists worked on the nuclear bomb, like went to the same high school.
So what was the cultural or other factors that made this group of people so, I mean, produced so many geniuses. Right.
So they were all Jewish. And von Neumann attributed this kind of pressure to succeed to growing up in kind of Central Europe between the two world wars, being surrounded by sort of anti-Semitism.
Now, Budapest was relatively tolerant, but it was in the air of Central Europe at the time. And he said that he felt a pressure to succeed or face extinction.
I mean, they were constantly under this huge, relentless kind of psychological pressure to kind of do the impossible.

and you know von Neumann in his letters from 1930 by which time he's safely in the in the US he's predicting disaster he's he predicts pretty accurately that there will be a second world war

and he predicts that European Jews will face extinction. So he is very acutely aware of this.
Of course, there are circumstances around Budapest at the time which meant that geniuses of um this sort were nurtured so there were private schools and they were all inevitably private schools and they were almost all boy schools as well and um von neumann went to one of uh three i think elite schools in Budapest at the time. Teller, for example, and Wigner, and

Szilard are all part of this Martians, part of this group called the Martians later. They all

went to these kind of elite schools. And von Neumann was spotted quite early on by his maths

teacher, who told his father, you know, your boy's exceptional. Let me arrange special tutoring for him.
So von Neumann gets picked out even from this group of exceptional people. And he's given a special course at the University of Budapest.
And his teachers are all just amazed at his abilities. So the joke was later on when all these guys met again at Los Alamos to work on the American bomb project that they had these funny Hungarian accents and they had these almost supernatural intellectual abilities.
So the joke was they must be from another planet. Now, when Wigner was asked about this, he said, there is no Hungarian phenomenon.
The only phenomenon that needs explaining is Johnny von Neumann. So you can tell from those sorts of comments what kind of person he was.
I'm actually curious to boil down what actually,

what exactly was going on that produced so many geniuses. I mean, one thing you proposed was maybe it was a private school, but I mean, as you just said, you know, he had taught himself integral and differential calculus by the time he was 10 and knew like four languages.
So maybe that aided his growth but I'm curious it seems like he was already on the path to becoming like a world star scientist yeah i mean he was renowned as a mathematician really early on i mean he as soon as he finished his phd where he resolves this incredibly difficult paradox in set theory, he helps to resolve it by 22. And then he goes to Gertigen, where quantum theory is being invented by another whiz kid, actually, Werner Heisenberg, of course, who's just a year older than von Neumann.
And von Neumann gets really interested in quantum mechanics. he produces this first mathematically rigorous version of it a few years later.

so I mean von Neumann clearly I mean he was just an exceptional he had an exceptional brain now his grandfather was, although he wasn't academically particularly successful, he had started his own very successful business. But what was interesting was that he had these calculational abilities that were actually better than von Neumann.
So von Neumann remembers asking his granddad these incredibly long sums, and his granddad would come back with answers pretty quickly. And von Neumann, despite all of his genius, he was never able to match these abilities himself.
And of course, there's a lot more to higher mathematics, as we know, than being able to do really long sums. But it's kind of interesting that there's some, you know, genetic predisposition there that we can see.
One interesting possibility that I've heard is you have Jewish emancipation in Europe in like, was it the 18th or 19th century? And afterwards, you have this tremendous streak of Jewish achievement that's halted by the Holocaust. So, you know, you have this brief window where this group of extraordinary people are able to achieve great things before, you know, before they're forced to emigrate or, you know, other things happen.
And I mean, it makes what happened in Europe during that time even more tragic when you consider what was stopped. One question I have is you have this person who is incredibly prolific.
Would he have been able to achieve as much as he did if he were born, say, today, given that a lot of the low-hanging fruit has been picked, is it just that he got into science and mathematics at a time that there was just so many different ideas combining and left to explore? Or, I mean, do you think that at any other time a person like von Neumann would have been able to be as prolific? No, I think you've really hit the nail on the head there. I think there was definitely a historical moment.
I mean, in terms of people with brains like von Neumann, they're pretty hard to think of. But, you know, in terms of raw mathematical ability, you look at somebody like Terence Tao today, or, you know, you consider that there's a few other pure mathematicians who could maybe match von Neumann's sort of brain I mean it was extraordinarily unusual but maybe not you know once in a century unusual but extremely unusual but I think there are a few things that kind of mark him out.

One is, yeah, the historical moment.

So he arrives on the scene in kind of, you know, 1910, 1920s,

and he's immersed in kind of a maths that's going through this logical crisis,

and it's going to spur people like Alan Turing and kurt goodell to think really hard about these step-by-step proofs how do we how do we prove stuff properly without getting into these awful paradoxes and that would lead later on that step-by-step thinking would be extremely influential when people came to think about programming and you know and algorithms and things like that so there's um so there's that side of things and then of course science just explodes you know you've got um masses of funding of course quantum mechanics becomes the atom bomb basically within a space of 25 years you have huge amounts of money suddenly being thrown at um at science and and then you get big science and you know economics is you know thanks to von norman um in large part becomes suddenly more mathematical but now um with that massive funding and the continued uh funding of science i think there's been um a great degree of of specialism um i think the time when one genius of von neumann stature could contribute so productively to kind of you know everything from pure mathematics right the way through quantum mechanics to various

fields of physics to you know non-linear equations and uh to distill out the modern form of of the computer the programmable computer to automata theory um you know come up with a proof that machines could reproduce themselves. I think, sadly,

that that was really a brief moment of the 20th century that made it possible. But the second thing that's incredibly rare about von Neumann that I noticed, he actually embraced this idea of applying maths to real world problems whereas many mathematicians many academics of all sorts actually would rather eschew you know the real world they don't want very much to do with it they um when it comes to mathematicians they'd rather be left alone in their ivory tower to prove theorems and von Neumann did a lot of that he left behind a you know a massive amount of pure mathematics but really my my book focuses on the stuff that he left behind that came about from engaging with with the real world and there's a huge amount of that and I think that's also what made him

really quite exceptional. The only other person that I can think of that is now as gifted mathematically as he was and has shown some interest in these sort of practical affairs is Stephen Wolfram.

So,

but, you know,

Wolfram was born in the wrong time, I think. Perhaps if he'd have been born in 1903, you know, he might have been a von Neumann-esque figure.
But so there's definitely a combination there of good luck, a historical moment, and just, you know, a particular attitude, maybe because he was brought up in a, you know, by a banker father who was not afraid to get his hands dirty. I mean, he was an investment banker, happily investing in firms, in the technology firms of the time.
People, you know, he invested in a Jacquard loom company, which used punch cards to program looms. You know, that made an impact on von Neumann, obviously, at the time.
So I think, yeah, there's a combination of reasons that von Neumann was so influential.

Wolfram could have been a great scientist at another time. I guess he just ended up writing

some mathematical software in our time. Not to say he hasn't tried other things.

So you suggest that maybe it was a time he spent working on practical problems that helped him

achieve so much. And I wonder if the opposite may not be true, that is it possible that because

Thank you. it was a time he spent working on practical problems that helped him achieve so much.
And I wonder if the opposite may not be true, that is it possible that because he got recruited into all these different projects that the government had going on at the time, especially because of World War II, you know, ballistics research, nuclear implosion devices, and then advising with like Cold War strategy, was this in some sense a distraction from the, you know, the basic research that he might have otherwise done and been more productive at?

Well, I mean, Brunowski thought that von Neumann

had kind of wasted his incredible talent.

But to me, the more I looked at his work,

the more I realized that for him, this engagement with the real world was actually vitally important. And, you know, it need not have been the work for the military.
But that is where at the time, in the unfortunately, in the early to mid 20th century, a lot of the challenging problems were, I mean, designing the atom bomb, which is where he made some key contributions.

And then later on, of course, the emergence of the computer is deeply, deeply linked to the mathematics of the atom bomb. and arguably it was his engagement with these areas that led him to to think and be in a position to kind of spur computing.
And as I argue, he was kind of a godfather of the open source movement. you know here's proof of that automata could could reproduce themselves and evolve.
All of this thinking came about because he was, I think, deeply engaged with the real world. And that that makes him unusual.
And he argues as much quite openly in an essay that he did called The Mathematician. and where he says that if mathematicians retreat too far kind of into their ivory towers if if the maths becomes just maths for the sake of maths with no um input from um kind of the real world then um the he he said it became baroque um uh and and uh not interesting so i find it really difficult to believe that if von neumann had sheltered himself away and somehow been left alone or didn't engage with the sorts of problems that he did, whether it was the computer or to his military work, that he would have left behind the kind of interesting oeuvre that he did.
He wouldn't have been von Neumann, right? I mean, you can see it's so deeply ingrained in his personality to be out there thinking all the time and to be thinking about key problems, that it's difficult to imagine a von Neumann that wasn't like that, that was tucked away. And I think that as a kind of intellectual biographer, that makes him kind of incredibly interesting but also incredibly challenging to tackle.
Yeah, that's what makes your book so interesting, is that you are a biographer of ideas. So, you know, a lot of other biographies about scientists really frustrate me because you get to hear all these details about their life, you know, which is also interesting, but you never get to engage with their ideas, which is probably a big part of what reading about a scientist should be about.
And you do that really well. So, you know, that was super fun.
Did John von Neumann have a miracle year? You know what? I don't know. And maybe you've looked at his publication record more closely than I have and counted up the papers.
But, you know, whilst Einstein, for example, and Kurt Goodell, when they were placed into this perfect environment that was the Institute for Advanced Study, right, they didn't have, you know, to teach anybody anything, they had massive holidays, they could do what they wanted. Well, Einstein's time there was really not very productive.
He had, you know, his miracle year, right, in the kind of early 20th century, which was incredible. But then his time at the IAS was not particularly productive.
He was trying to find his theory of everything. And Gödel, after this incredible work in Europe on you know his incompleteness theorems again he spent a lot of time at the IAS going for nice walks with Einstein and you know and talking chatting to von Neumann but of course you know there wasn't much coming out there in comparison now when you when when you look at von Neumann's productivity at the IAS, I mean, he was inventing whole new fields of mathematics.
He was bringing about the birth of the modern computer. You know, he had this project at the IAS to bring a computer to them against, you know, it has to be said, against the wishes of many of the IAS staff.
But, you know, he was, he was, he'd written three volumes worth of operator theory. And he always joked, right, that, you know a a mathematician's productive years are over um a you know at 30 or at uh 28 it was always 10 years away from however old he was at the time so um you know he he clearly felt that he had a lot more to do.
And I think that's what made his kind of untimely death all the more tragic for everybody. But, you know, it was incredibly painful for him.
You know, nobody enjoys staring death in the face. But for von Neumann, it was extraordinarily painful.
And I think you mentioned the theory that it might have had to do with his spending time around nuclear tests, the bone cancer he got, which is ironic, but still tragic. So we know him very well for his work on computers.
I'm curious why his research on cellular automata and constructors hasn't taken off and why that isn't considered, why that hasn't been research, I guess, as fundamental as computers are. You know, like David Deutsch has recently published about constructor theory.
His claim is that a universal constructor is like as fundamental a tool as a universal computer is, something that can construct anything else. Why did this train of thought kind of languish? Well, I mean, that's fascinating, isn't it? Because, I mean, the book's called The Man from the Future, right? And I loved von Neumann's proof of his automata theory, you know, his proof that automata could reproduce.
And, you know, he combines Turing's universal computer with this idea of a construction unit. And so he produces the universal constructor, right right and um i think in a sense this is an idea that's still kind of ahead of its time and just after i published um the man from the future in the uk this group in the states this published um their paper on xenobots And these are kind of stem cells, and they sort of whirl around and collect other stem cells together in little groups.
And then these stem cells themselves start to whirl around and collect more together. So I suddenly realised, wow, this is the embodiment of von Neumann's self-reproducing automata and it's only taken what you know 70 years for them to make an appearance and these stem cells were designed by um kind of a uh a neural net so artificial intelligence and here we are you know all of von Neumann's little influences coming together in

this neat neat package I think maybe in another 10 years time we'll be asking the same question again why didn't anybody realize this stuff was important I mean when von Neumann's first biographer Norman McRae wrote about automata theory who is extremely dismissive barely you know gave it a few pages as if it's like something quirky. And now we're beginning to see kind of it's the influence of this extraordinarily powerful idea, if nothing else.
We know that it inspired those early pioneers in nanotechnology to think about universal constructors at the molecular level. We know that RepRap, this idea of a 3D printer where you could print most of its parts, you know, I talked to the inventor of that and he said he was inspired by this idea, Von Neumann's idea.
And, you know, in the 50s and 60s and 70s you had people thinking about well how do we explore the universe well why don't we make a probe that can make more copies of itself you know out in space by foraging on the planets it finds it's this incredibly fertile idea and i think we're still just at the at the beginning of really working out where this goes

and it's kind of dangerous and it's kind of exciting and who knows where it's gonna gonna end I think um for me at least his his work here and the suggestion the implications of it are even more scary than like the counterintuitive implications from his game theory work because like Robin like, Robin Hanson has this paper, I forget the title, but the idea is whatever force or, like, civilization or whatever is expanding fastest will be the one that controls most of the universe, at least unless impeded by another one. And so if it's the case that this sort of von Neumann probes almost spread like a virus around the universe and turning everything into goop, maybe like the expected outcome of colonization is just that that's what the universe ends up looking like, where the low hanging fruit, so to speak, has been burned away by such probes.
And it's an interesting, like futuristic hypothesis. And one I don't really hear much talked about, which I think is interesting.
Well, you know, that's one way it could go. Let's hope it doesn't go that way.
You know, maybe they'll, you know, build us a new home after we've trashed this one. Who knows? But yeah, i think of course you know these sorts of science fictiony elements maybe maybe uh part of it is that uh no you know nobody wants to talk about automata theory because it's got these unsavory science fiction elements attached to it um you know people would rather uh stick to um the von Neumann architecture and all that sort of stuff um but yeah I I mean um it's the fecundity really of the idea more than the mathematics isn't it it just you know that somebody can take this question that philosophers have been kicking around for sort of centuries you know can machines make more machines can machines have babies can machines reproduce and he just says yeah well let's let's look at this mathematically shall we and then he solves it and you know we have the answer and that's what i find gripping about von Neumann's work and And it's kind of what I found overall as I was approaching this book that I wanted to show that people,

when you look at kind of popular science books or popular mathematics books,

the majority of them are really about kind of celebrating the maths or the science in and of itself.

Right. They rarely actually talk about maths as this kind of existential thing that humans have invented that underpins our technological world.
We don't really think of it like that often. And with von Neumann, as I was writing about von Neumann, it became impossible not to, right? So take game theory.
What was he trying to do there well this was rooted again in this very early 20th century idea amongst mathematicians that maths was extraordinarily successful so we can apply it to kind of anything and you know why should we leave the human mind and human behavior to psychologists when they've been so terribly unsuccessful and actually getting anywhere with understanding it? Let's try to do the maths on this. And so kind of that, I think it's that impetus that really drove a lot of mathematicians, including von Neumann, to tackle the theory of games, which is really about conflict and cooperation.
And I think that was kind of his motivation there. And again, you've got the very thing that some pure mathematicians would say, oh yeah, von Neumann was wasting his time by being so involved with military work or you know this practical stuff he was whizzing about looking for computational power well you know without that part of his personality would he have been so interested in in game theory would he have done would he have achieved what he did um you know in in those terms which is recasting economics in a you know in a completely different light really yeah yeah it's almost like he foresaw the replication uh crisis in psychology or something um you know speaking of his work on game theory i think that part was especially um especially relevant today I'm curious how his min-max theorem and theory of zero-sum games, that makes it really easy to model two-player games, two-player zero-sum games, like the one we had against the Soviet Union.
I'm curious how he would have thought about a multipolar world where more than two parties have nuclear weapons and are possibly roughly equal in power. How would a game theory generalize to that kind of problem? Yeah, I mean, so it's not at all clear, right, that von Neumann thought about nuclear strategy in kind of mini-max terms a zero-sum game in fact there's quite a lot of evidence that he didn't I mean his um he for example he took very little interest in the prisoner's dilemma that wasn't cooked up by him it was cooked up by people at Rand who were kind of inspired and influenced by him and of course prisoner's dilemmaer's Dilemma isn't a zero-sum game, it's a non-zero-sum game.
But it became this template with which many people thought about nuclear strategy in the Cold War. Now, if you look at what von Neumann wrote in Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour with Morgenstern, what he was concerned with, his kind of solutions were based around cooperation.
so he was like were there stable solutions to games um if a number of the players cooperated

and you know was this an optimal solution to the game? So you could imagine, right, say if you play, I don't know, Monopoly, and there's three of you, often what you'll notice is one player will start winning and then the two other players, even without talking to each other they'll sort of gang up on them, right? They'll form a kind of alliance and Von Neumann's early look at game theory was based around increasing numbers of these kind of alliances. So if you wanted to know about a 10-player game, von Neumann tried to kind of think about how, you know, within this 10-player group you could get different alliances that were kind of stable and would lead to a winning solution.
It wasn't entirely successful, and it took John Forbes Nash on to kind of um develop this idea of non-cooperative game theory which was um hugely successful um uh but um that kind of doesn't chime well really with this idea of von neumann viewing the world in these zero-sum terms, right? He came from this rather central European background where they were used to discussing ideas in kind of bars and cafes over a drink and talking about stuff quite freely and sharing and giving credit to others when it's due. And so, I mean, he was obviously proud of his own contributions, and he was quite defensive about them.
But he was also reasonably honest. If he had culled an idea from somebody else, he would totally be honest about that and give them credit and so this kind of thread of thinking I think was was quite important and it's been weirdly overlooked when it came to kind of this caricature of von Neumann that developed as a result of Kubrick using him as one inspiration for Dr.
Strangelaar later on. Now von Neumann's actual thoughts on nuclear strategy, he penned a paper in the 50s before he died.
And in that, he makes it clear that he doesn't, he's not really talking about this, the idea of a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union anymore. It's a lot more complicated.
It's more like what evolved at RAND later. So, you know, he was deeply uncomfortable with this idea that, you know, we had two or more sides with enough nuclear weapons to wipe out the world many times over so he thought that if nuclear weapons ever were used um you know you would have to be insane to just go all out so you know he he talked about kind of holding holding back and you know you toss it if one person tosses a nuclear weapon over and blows, blows at the city, then the other person does.
And it proceeds a little bit more slowly. It doesn't escalate all at once into this massive, catastrophic nuclear war.
But the thing that people picked up most about his thinking was, of course, in this brief period after the Second World War, where he famously said, if you say, bomb them tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say four o'clock, why not two o'clock? And, you know, it's not entirely clear that he meant that in all seriousness. I mean, his daughter certainly thinks he was advocating for a preemptive strike,

or at least he was asking people to think quite rationally about whether a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union might be worthwhile, given that he felt that it was almost inevitable Stalin, as soon as he developed nuclear weapons, would launch a kind of strike on the United States. he was sort of arguing

well, you know, if we're in this situation where we're thinking about it why shouldn't we do it sooner rather than later and shouldn't we do it before the soviet union has enough weapons that um you know they can fight back and shouldn't we do something to ensure that nuclear power doesn't get into the wrong hands and you know whether that's a world government or whether the United States functions as a de facto guardian of nuclear technology you know it wasn't it wasn't clear I think the other thing that I sort of say in my book is I try to lay out the context of this. I mean, this was after the most destructive war that the world had ever known.
Millions of people had died. And von Neumann had predicted this and the Holocaust very, you know, successfully years in advance.
And he now was convinced that within a decade, there would be a third world war with nuclear weapons. weapons now if you imagine that and if you think that and if your past predictions have come true then it allows you incredible scope to think in this kind of rather kind of ruthless manner about well maybe we may be bombing you know Soviet Union and wiping out you know 100,000 people's lives at the push of a button maybe maybe that's not not as bad as it as it could be when you consider that millions of people are going to be dead in a decade and you know potentially bringing all of human civilization to an abrupt end, well, maybe we can stop that from happening.
And it turns out that it's a surprisingly common idea at the time in America and elsewhere. I mean, Bertrand Russell, for example, the famous pacifist, also argued for a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union if they didn't give up their nuclear ambitions.
And, you know, you dig around in the post kind of in the late 40s in this brief window after the Second World War, when the US seemed to have a virtual monopoly on nuclear weapons. and you find suddenly that a lot more people supported this idea,

including a large proportion by the way of the american public um then then you think is is possible um you know as you talk about in the book there's like a very interesting but extremely scary precarious scenario where two sides think um two sides have a nuclear weapon or think that both sides have a nuclear weapon, but neither one has developed the ability yet to defend their nuclear silos against initial attack. So then, you know, both of them think that the other one, if they launch a first strike, there would be no deterrence.
So then both of them are incentivized to launch that first strike, which is kind of like the opposite of mad and you know that's that's one worry if like i don't know if if um if nuclear technology gets better in some ways that could have make a nuclear war much more likely because people would start thinking okay but we can just take out all their all all their entire arsenal but we said they have no way to retaliate um um i'm curious curious what, you mentioned, you know, he had a good way of thinking about escalation. I'm curious how he would have thought about, you know, one problem we have today is like, you can have cyber warfare, which is immensely destructive in an economic sense, but doesn't warrant or seem to warrant a sort of land war.
And then you can have a land war, like, I don't know, China takes over Taiwan, or you know, you have what's going on in Ukraine. And but it seems like way too harsh to react with nuclear war.
And I'm curious how von Neumann would have been able to think about these kinds of problems. You know, von Neumann, I mean, he was recruited by Rand, but the work that he did and Rand became this kind of hothouse for nuclear strategic thinking, right, in the Cold War and it influenced American policy.
But von Neumann, apart from this paper on nuclear strategy, he seems to have taken remarkable little interest in the whole thing i mean when he was at rand he was um uh computing various solutions um to kind of jewels so you know he'd worked out the minimax theorem and um so he was busy well you know if you have a plane and a, I don't know, a tank or, you know, whatever, a submarine and a ship, you know, and they can see each other coming. At what point should they fire? At what point should they do this? And so he got kind of involved in that and computing.
And he kind of lost interest in game theory again as soon as computing came to the fore.

So whilst he was doing this, he ended up helping Rand kind of realise their own ambitions of having a computer.

So it's not at all clear to me how much he'd still carry on being involved in the strategy you know in in in the um nuclear strategy side but of course i mean this idea of kind of if you are coming up with your best strategy then you have to think what um you know your opponent will make of that and you have to imagine that they're, you know, your opponent will make of that. And you have to imagine that they're also, you know, an intelligent opponent who's going to be out for themselves.
And that thinking is very deeply embedded into Minimax. And, you know, and that was clearly very influential later on.

One thing I find very interesting about von Neumann's work for the government and in aiding these kinds of strategic conversations is, at least from my understanding, it seems that a lot of the scientists during that time were somewhat radical and sympathetic to socialism, you know, like Bertrand Russell or Oppenheimer.

And von Neumann seems to be a very practical, non-radical personical person I mean you can think that's a good thing or a bad thing but it seems like he broke from the conventional I guess elite scientific culture at the time I'm curious what about his personality or background do you think made him that way or am I even characterizing the situation in the correct way? Yeah, no, I think that's fair. In fact, if anything, he was considered kind of right wing or at least a Cold War hawk in certain circles.
I think if you look at him quite closely, I mean, you could argue in many ways he was, you know, something of a liberal. But, you know, at the time, some, you know, a lot of people felt that he was quite hawkish.
Now, the reason for that is that there was a shortly after the First World War in Hungary, there were two things that happened. One was there was a very shortlived communist uprising and that government lasted for six months and it was pretty brutal um you know they they reclaimed private property from wealthy fam wealthy families and and there was just general chaos and um beatings on the street and stuff stuff.
But then something happened afterwards and a military, essentially a military government just marched in, led by General Horthy, and they took control. And that turned out to be even worse.
I mean, there was public hangings and and rapes and um you know thousands of people ended up dead and um many jewish people um at that time were seen to have been collaborating with the earlier communist um government so you know many jews were basically shot on the streets as well now the von neumanns were you know by a dint of their wealth um they were kind of protected from this but von neumann saw all of this as he was growing up and then of course later with the rise of the nazis in Germany he um you know had left Germany by then, but a lot of his formative years as a scientist or as a mathematician were spent in Germany. And he adored kind of interwar Germany in the, at least in the late 20s.
And for him, it was this perfect intellectual climate. I mean, you have to remember that Germany was, you know, scientifically and mathematically definitely kind of the centre of the world then.
I mean, America just was nothing at the time. It was only, you know, kind of during the Second World War and post the Second World War um from the 30s um late 30s onwards that america became this scientific and technological kind of powerhouse really and you know benefited from many of these european scientists who who left as a result of the nazis now he'd seen this and he his lesson wasism, you know, is something that we shouldn't tolerate.

And so when he came to the states, his priority was to put his expertise into the hands of the democratic government there. And whilst he definitely was advising them, he, you know, I got the feeling that, you know, he wasn't interested in making decisions on their behalf because, you know, this was a democratically elected government.
I think deep down he was a democrat he felt he should work as hard as possible to give the US government the tools that it needed

to overcome the Nazis

and to, you know, and to maintain their lead as kind of the preeminent democracy in the world. But so he was kind of, I think, more allergic to authoritarianism, whereas I think, you know, before the Second World War happened, before we knew what was happening under Stalin, there were many intellectuals who were willing to give the communism, deep left thinking, more of a chance.
Whereas von Neumann had kind of seen what that turned into in Hungary. And he'd seen that essentially it became a kind of authoritarian regime.
He was deeply suspicious of stalin um from day one for the very same reason and he'd had these experiences of you know europe being turned upside down by the nazis and i think that really shaped him very profoundly um he became quite cynical about human nature as well at the same time. I think, you know, deep down, it was, you know, superficially, he was kind of a good man.
And he, you know, he, he was nice to people. And I think that's really where he started, you know, in his day to day interactions with people.
He was he was nice.

He would do these incredible things very quietly behind people's backs that many other scientists wouldn't dream of. Like, you know, this builder, Hungarian builder contacted him in the middle of the Second World War and said, I want to learn more about maths.
But I'm in America basically building stuff. Where do I find out more about maths? So he writes to his in wartime hungary and gets them to send over a bunch of hungarian maths textbooks i mean and and later on you've got people like uh mandelbro who came over thanks to his reference and you know he was at princeton and the ias and years later when Mandelbrough ran into problems with his boss he goes looking for work elsewhere and he finds that like whatever a decade earlier long after you know and this is long after von Neumann was dead you know von Neumann had sent out letters and talked to people so you know Mandelbr is doing really important work, but he may struggle because what he's doing is so cutting edge.
So if he does and he comes looking for a job, please give him a job because this guy's brilliant. And he does these little things and he of course helps scientists leave Europe before the Nazis make that impossible.
He helps to get Gödel out of Germany, for example. So, you know, he's this very conflicted personality.
So I think, you know, he's, as you would expect, quite a complex and thoughtful human being. And he's not easily characterized as, you know, Dr.
Strangelove or, you know, a bleeding heart liberal. I understand what you meant, but out of context, he was superficially a good man.
Has got to be the best backhanded compliment ever. So the final question, I want to be more so your time.
You're a researcher yourself. You have a PhD in protein crystallography.
You were a medical researcher. And now you've analyzed John Moore Neumann's life, probably the greatest genius of all time.
Have you extrapolated some lessons about how to be prolific or how to come up with new insights in different fields? Not at all. But I would thoroughly recommend if you're going to write a book that you try not to give up your day job a year before the worst pandemic descends that we've known about for you know decades descends on on and engulfs the planet thus ensuring that instead of working on your book about the the cleverest person of the 20th century who works on abstruse set theory you end up having to homeschool a recalcitrant 10 year old um so that's that's one you know if you want to be productive don't do that okay um but in other terms i think you know it's it's dangerous trying to you know come out with a kind of self-help book based on von Neumann's lifestyle right I mean

his first wife left him because he was too busy thinking and you know she took up with essentially a graduate student Horner Cooper who was you know a physics graduate student and you know and she was quite the thinker herself.

She ended up becoming this mover and shaker in um science admin and uh you know his second wife was uh very clever herself um clara dan but you know he thought incessantly um from morning to night and you, even at the cocktail parties that he threw, he would sometimes just find noise conducive to work and he would just rush off cocktail in hand to write down some some theorem. I mean, what what do you draw? What do what kind of lessons do you draw from that? You know, the only lesson I draw is that is that that just don't do that you know try and try and forge some sort of um work schedule that that kind of works for you we can't all be superhuman and uh you know his you know as we see his relationships his human relationships suffered and he was you know deeply troubled as he as he went out at the close of his life, as, you know, cancer was eroding his mental capabilities.
I mean, he kind of rediscovered Catholicism. He'd converted when he was younger, but he had this, he was overtaken by this fear of mortality.
And I think, you know, when we productive life i think you know we probably all want to go out on on something of a high and not go out in abject terror so yeah you know read about this incredible human being but don't try to draw too many life lessons from it i think yeah yeah i, yeah, I know. That's definitely very fair.

You're an Ijon Moenemond, all of a sudden.

So, Ananyo, thank you so much for your time.

I really appreciate you coming on the podcast.

Thanks very much.

It was a pleasure.