博文
Selected English readings for recitation: William Poundstone
|||
Max Neumann wa cultured and well read. He was an amateur poet in both Hungarian and German. At work he was an enlightened businessman who felt it fitting to consider the social desirability of businesses he was financing. Dinner-table discussions with his children often touched on the social responsibilities of bankers. He tried to interest his sons in banking by bringing home mementos of the businesses his firm was backing. Von Neumann's brother Nicholas speculated that Johnny's idea for computer punched cards was inspired by the family's discussion of the Jacquard 100m factory that Max's bank financed.
...
From childhood, von Neumann was gifted with a photographic memory. At the age of six, he was able to exchange jokes with his father in classical Greek. The Neumann family sometimes entertained guests with demonstrations of Johnny's ability to memorize phone books. A guest would select a page and column of the phone book at random. Young Johnny read the column over a few times, then handed the book back to the guest. He could answer any questions put to him (who has number such and such?) or recite names, addresses, and numbers in order.
The Neumann household was a congenial environment for a child prodigy's intellectual development. Max Neumann bought a library in an estate sale, cleared one room of furniture to house it, and commissioned a cabinetmaker to fit the room with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Johnny spent many hours reading books from this library. One was the encyclopedic history of the world edited by the once-fashionable German historian Wilhelm Oncken. Von Neumann read it volume by volume. He would balk at getting a haircut unless his mother let him take a volume of Oncken along. By the outbreak of World War I, Johnny had read the entire set and could draw analogies between current events and historical ones, and discuss both in relation to theories of military and political strategy. He was ten years old.
Von Neumann was exposed to psychology through a relative, Sandor Ferenczi, a disciple of Freud who had introduced psychoanalysis into Hungary. Von Neumann also had important exposure to European literature and music at an early age. His brother Nicholas recalls that Johnny was intrigued by the philosophical underpinnings of artistic works. Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author appealed to Johnny for its confusion of reality and make-believe. Bach's "Art of the Fugue" left an impression due to the fact that it was written for several voices with the instruments unspecified. Johnny was so impressed with this that Nicholas credits it as a source for the idea of the stored-program computer.
An early interest in science led him to conduct home experiments. Johnny and his brother Michael somehow got a piece of sodium and dropped it into water to watch the reaction. After the sodium had
dissolved (producing caustic sodium hydroxide), they tasted the water. The worried family contacted a physician.
From 1911 through 1921 von Neumann attended the Lutheran Gymnasium for boys, a high school with a strong academic reputation. Despite its religious affiliation, the gymnasium accepted students of all backgrounds and even provided appropriate religious training. Von Neumann's first math teacher at the gymnasium, Professor Laszlo Racz, quickly recognized his talent and called Max in for a conference.
Racz recommended a special math study program for von Neumann and set about organizing it.
Von Neumann was occasionally an exasperation to his teachers. He would confess that he had not studied the day's assignment, then participate in the discussion more knowledgeably than anyone else. Johnny got straight A's in math and most of the academic subjects. He got C's in physical education.
The Hungary of von Neumann's generation produced an extraordinary number of geniuses. Von Neumann was a schoolmate of several. He was a year behind Eugene Wigner, later a renowned physicist, at the gymnasium. (In adulthood, Wigner said he realized he would be a second-rate mathematician compared with von Neumann and therefore turned to physics.) Johnny met Edward Teller in 1925 when both studied under a renowned teacher, Lipot Feher. Other notable Hungarians of the time included laser pioneer Dennis Gabor and physicist-turned-biologist Leo Szilard.
Exerpt from PRISONER'S DILEMMA by William Poundstone
https://wap.sciencenet.cn/blog-286797-599066.html
上一篇：Selected English readings for recitation: Steve Olson
下一篇：Selected English readings for recitation: Lewis Carroll
