John von Neumann: A Strange Kind of Bird - by Eric Gilliam

Last week, I finished a new biography that I’ve been waiting on for months. Eagerly waiting for a book to be released is not something I make a habit of. But this was different: this book was about the great Johnny von Neumann. On top of von Neumann’s wide-ranging excellence being fun to read about, the way he made many of his contributions, particularly in fields completely dissimilar to his native field of mathematics, provides insight into the kinds of creativity and collaboration we should be finding ways to incentivize in the research community. Unlike someone like Dirac, whose major contributions felt to many contemporaries as if he were conjuring mathematical laws of nature out of the sky, von Neumann’s process seems to be something that is much more replicable. While I have no hopes that one person can or should hope to replicate what he did, it is believable that many researchers, if properly encouraged to seek problems and collaborate in a way similar to von Neumann, could ho

Last week, I finished a new biography that I’ve been waiting on for months. Eagerly waiting for a book to be released is not something I make a habit of. But this was different: this book was about the great Johnny von Neumann. On top of von Neumann’s wide-ranging excellence being fun to read about, the way he made many of his contributions, particularly in fields completely dissimilar to his native field of mathematics, provides insight into the kinds of creativity and collaboration we should be finding ways to incentivize in the research community. Unlike someone like Dirac, whose major cont