9 comments

  • mjreacher 797 days ago
    On the topic of von Neumann and Solomon Lefschetz, a while back I saw a documentary about Paul Halmos that discussed them, unfortunately it seems to have been removed for copyright but the trailer is still accessible [0].

    The gist of what he said was that while he admired von Neumann greatly, particularly for his incredible speed and clarity of understanding, sometimes he felt a greater respect and closeness for Lefschetz, who lost both of his hands in an industrial accident and despite saying that Lefschetz's style of thinking was 'incredibly confused' in the sense he [Lefschetz] didn't have a full understanding of what he himself [Lefschetz] was thinking, he wanted to get to know him more. More evidence comes from a quote of J. Barkley Rosser which goes as follows [1]:

    "If Church said it's obvious, then everybody saw it a half hour ago. If Weyl says it's obvious, von Neumann can prove it. If Lefschetz says it's obvious, it's false."

    He also notes unlike Lefschetz von Neumann was not considered by some mathematicians to be a great mathematician because there wasn't one big thing or field that he became the best in the world at or contributed the most too, noting that in mathematics he would likely be best remembered for his work in rings of operators (now known as von Neumann algebras). This lines up with several other stories I've read in math history where many considered much of von Neumann's work past the 1940s (where he was working primarily in applied mathematics and other applied fields) a waste of his talent.

    [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONvYPldXoZs

    [1]: https://web.math.princeton.edu/oral-history/c21.pdf

  • ArtWomb 797 days ago
    Just stumbled upon an interview with Robert Oppenheimer where he discusses the creative culture at IAS circa mid-1950s. Under 100 fellows at the time, but spanning the spectrum from George Kennen to Niels Bohr. Sacred grounds ;)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSG_G5CVVlM

  • nvalis 797 days ago
    I have no idea why, but it is always interesting and inspiring to read about how known figures of historic interest were related to each other and how their (normally seperatly told) stories intertwined. Thanks!
    • jo_in_europe 797 days ago
      I've read a handful of biographies of 20th century physicists recently, which I enjoyed for the same reasons. Ulam was a Los Alamos mathematician (and a great friend of Von Neumann). Anderson discovered the meson, which Yukawa had predicted. Fritzsche named nuclear fission (after doing important work on it). Elasser was a wandering scientist, who (to me) seemed to be "on the outside of the inside"; he gives accounts of his dealings with most of the atomic era players.

      - Adventures of a Mathematician (Ulam)

      - What Little I Remember (Frisch)

      - Memoirs of a Physicist in the Atomic Age (Elasser)

      - The Traveller (Yukawa)

      - Discovery of Anti-Matter (Carl Anderson)

      Also Freeman Dyson's and Feynman's stuff. I'm ever open to recommendations from readers who enjoy the same stuff.

      • brummm 797 days ago
        If you are a physicist, Abraham Pais' "Subtle is the Lord" about Einstein's accomplishments in physics is an absolutely unique and amazing book. However, I didn't ask if you are a physicist for no reason. It talks mainly about the science and not about Einstein's personal life and you will need a physics education to follow along.
      • jangstrom 797 days ago
        Thanks for the pointers. I'll check them out.

        I recently read

        - The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom

        - The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (Paul Erdős)

        The Dirac book is by a physicist, as opposed to a professional biographer. I very much enjoyed it. Dirac crossed paths and interacted with all of the great quantum physicists in the 20th century. He and his work never captured the public imagination in the same way Einstein did, nor did his personality and propensity for teaching resonate like Feynman or Sagan. (Feynman was, of course, an exceedingly brilliant physicist, but I think he was known more by the public for his personality than his QED). But he had a lot of ideas that were ahead of his time, and he was driven by the notion of mathematical beauty. Hell, the Dirac equation was a work of inspired genius that seemed to come from the annals of his mind alone.

        Similar to Einstein, his work got away from him, and later in life he was resistant to the beast he helped create (quantum field theory).

        Erdős was a prolific, unparalleled genius in number theory, as well as a wandering academic. He was quite inept at self-care, and found shelter based on the hospitality of his friends and colleagues. He never held a permanent position, spending his time trotting the globe to collaborate with interesting folks. I came away from the book feeling quite melancholy about the man and his life. But he seemed to have followed his passion in a way few do. On the other hand, he would likely pity me, the mathematician-turned-physicist-turned-industrial-researcher.

      • gww 797 days ago
        If you haven't read it The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes is in the same vein and excellent. It doesn't focus on a single physicist but covers a lot of the physics and chemistry that led to the construction of the atomic bomb.
      • edge17 797 days ago
        Thanks for the recommendations, I do read a lot of biographies and find the overlap of the stories of these important people to be particularly interesting. Some good ones I have read:

        - American Prometheus - About J. Robert Oppenheimer's life. Lots of stories of lots of scientists and politicians, bureaucrats, etc throughout his life.

        - Benjamin Franklin's autobiography - Wasn't a great book, but towards the end made mention that he wanted to meet Issac Newton when he went to England on some government business. Until reading it, I hadn't realized they were contemporaries.

        - Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson - Lots of stories with people well known inside the technology industry.

      • fgh 797 days ago
        If you are also a little bit interested in philosophy, Heisenberg's "Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations" is a wonderful recommendation.
        • fgh 797 days ago
          Forgot to mention another book: Karl Sigmund, Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science.

          A really beautiful book with lots of photographies of all members of the Vienna circle and what happened to them. Some parts, of course, are also about Gödel.

      • Trex_Egg 797 days ago
        Thanks for the details
    • mudita 797 days ago
      You might like this story about Freeman Dyson and Richard Feynman having a road trip:

      https://youtu.be/1Rr3ZWt1ULQ (the whole interview is very interesting and contains a lot of stories of meeting other physicists and mathematicians, it’s broken up into a series of snippets of a few minutes each on youtube)

      In the end this trip lead to one of Dyson’s biggest contributions to physics, he could talk to Feynman about his research on the road trip and visited Schwinger afterwards and as such was in a unique position to recognise and formalise the equivalence of Feynman’s, Schwinger’s and Tomanaga's formulations of quantum electrodynamics. This was an important step towards the acceptance of Feynman diagrams.

      I also really liked "Maker of Patterns”, Dyson’s autobiography through letters.

    • lehmannerich 797 days ago
      • nvalis 797 days ago
        That was an interesting read, thank you.
    • vmchale 797 days ago
      I had no idea either - Gödel's was extremely mentally ill, didn't realize how long it was.
  • dang 797 days ago
    Einstein isn't wearing jeans there is he? It looks like he might be, but I assume 1952 was much too early for that.
    • privatdozent 797 days ago
      The photograph has been artificially colourized. Original here: https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/26078/lot/22/
      • tagoregrtst 797 days ago
        This is why I despise artificial coloration.

        Its fine as a filter I can privately turn on to delude myself. But when the pictures spread it reinforced our modern biases in the past

      • dang 797 days ago
        Ah, that's certainly what did it. Thanks!
    • nvalis 797 days ago
      What makes you think it's denim? I would say it looks quite similar to the trousers the others are wearing (especially the ones of Whitney Oates).

      Solely going by the timeline described in [0] it's rather unlikely that these are denim.

      [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17101768

    • raxxorrax 797 days ago
      Probably some form of cloth pants. Stylish though, definitely works with that haircut.
  • publicola1990 797 days ago
    Is it Yevegny Lifshetz?
  • lincpa 797 days ago
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  • Jenny8090 797 days ago
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  • paganel 797 days ago
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    • dang 797 days ago
      "Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

      Dumb, predictable flamewars are, to say the least, uninteresting.

      https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

      Edit: we've had to ask you not to do this more than once before. Continuing to do it will eventually get your account banned here, so please don't.

    • syki 797 days ago
      The military-industrial complex you refer to would be the war efforts of allied nations. Those war efforts didn’t start in earnest until the Munich Agreement in the case of the UK and quite a bit later in the case of the US. Your writing seems to paint this in a negative light and this is an extreme position. One may view current military spending in the U.S. negatively but to view the WW 2 efforts thusly is bizarre.

      As to them being men and white it is a historical fact that at that time white men dominated in science and economics. That is not the fault of the referenced men and it’s not as if in hindsight we are glorifying the male scientists while diminishing the contribution of their female counterparts. There were very few of them. Marie Curie is still the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two separate fields so it’s not as if female contributions were always ignored or downplayed.

      I don’t think your take is cynical but rather somewhat pointless. I can’t see what point you are trying to make or highlight.

    • yokoprime 797 days ago
      Cherry picking some facts to build up your narrative is indeed cynical, yes. You could similarily point out that none are wearing shorts or sandals.
      • paganel 797 days ago
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        • jo_in_europe 797 days ago
          I understand about shorts, but it's not offensive to compare ethnicity with sandals.
    • Synaesthesia 797 days ago
      Einstein had some very radical political views. That's why he wasn't permitted to work on the manhattan project, which he probably would have thought immoral anyway.
    • throw-8462682 797 days ago
      > I know this is a cynic take,

      It’s worse than that. This take is a trivial restatement of history, namely that whites and men had most of the power, while amplifying outrage with people already agreeing with you, not contributing to lessening the divide, and causing people like myself to self censor by replying using throwaway accounts.

      • paganel 797 days ago
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        • newswasboring 797 days ago
          I think what people are having trouble understanding about these kind of statements is what do you want to do about it? What kind of idolizing are you actually against? I have never seen these people being used as examples of morally virtuous people. Even in this thread/article nobody is calling them morally virtuous. Are you against saying anything positive about them?
        • throw-8462682 797 days ago
          > started "idolising" past scientists [..] whose primary purpose on life had become, basically, how to best kill other people

          We all should be careful to judge people in history with our current set of morals. The scientists in the photo all experienced the horrors of WWII. I don’t think it requires to much mental gymnastics to have the position that the deterrence of nuclear weapons would lead to a safer world, especially in the post WWII context. Note that this is not a blanket statement against judging people in history. I just don’t think this applies to the scientists here.

    • leephillips 797 days ago
      There’s a recent article in Scientific American loosely related to your concerns that I suspect you will find insightful.
    • karmakurtisaani 797 days ago
      Surely you're trolling, user paganel.
    • hashimotonomora 797 days ago
      And?
    • maskil 797 days ago
      The Jews freed from Hitler's concentration camp would beg to differ.