(Audio) The Man from the Future, by Bhattacharya

Monday September 7, 2026

It's amazing how long this book can go without mentioning von Neumann. Indeed, it seems to have been published with two different subtitles: one has “the visionary life of John von Neumann,” while the other has ideas instead of life. The ideas subtitle is more representative. It is very interesting.

The author will stop at nothing to emphasize how smart von Neumann was. I am convinced, of course. So why did he not do anything quite so excellent as Einstein or Gödel? I suspect it may be to do with his having been rather too rich, and also (possibly in connection) that he spent too much time working on military things, often in secret. For whatever reason, it seems he didn't stick to things quite the way Einstein did.

I hadn't known that von Neumann was responsible for the ol' zero-is-the-empty-set construction, or that he's responsible for the quantification of utility based on gambling (in Theory of Games and Economic Behavior). He also seems to have been a sort of early example of techno-concern for the future along the lines of More Everything Forever, with his reproducing probes and so on. I think there was also a decent intro to Hilbert spaces in there.

An interesting detail has von Neumann's second wife Klára (Klári) writing the first code with a real subroutine, for the ENIAC just as it was converted to run stored programs, doing Monte Carlo with Metropolis. Neat!

“...mathematics is the foundation of all exact knowledge of natural phenomena.” (Hilbert)

I re-found this one and found another. Oh Hilbert! You know he wrote a geometry book? Hadn't been formal enough for him!

I was fascinated to learn about Emil du Bois-Reymond's “Die sieben Welträtsel” (seven world-riddles) of which he said "Ignoramus et ignorabimus" — "we do not know and we will not know." It was maybe just three that were "ignorabimus," but anyway the interesting point here is that Hilbert hated it, saying "Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen." (We must know. We will know.) In the book this is largely setting up that Gödel was proving Hilbert wrong, but the whole thing is interesting to me because I've had related thoughts. In my shabby notes I even (quite by coincidence) used a list of seven.

Interesting stuff on Heisenberg's matrix mechanics... Apparently Heisenberg didn't even know what matrices are and sort of invented them in order to make his theory? He had to have Born tell him about matrices?

So Heisenberg uncertainty is non-commutativity of position and momentum matrices (operators)... I think Ellenberg has a nice toy example of this in his Shape...

So does Hilbert’s spectral theorem actually do spectra of atoms?! Eigenfunctions/values of Heisenberg matrices? It seems yes, but I don't have a complete handle on it yet...

“If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.” (von Neumann)

I re-found that quote, together with another one:

“In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.” (von Neumann)

Surely you're joking, Mr. von Neumann? But I suppose he was something of a “shut up and calculate” quantum guy... And the guy whose broken “proof” arguably set back thought on quantum foundations for quite some time.