flâneur

Comments - John von Neumann: A Strange Kind of Bird

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Modern scientific endeavors are a stultified and cultish mess of bureaucracy pushing against ever greater natural barriers of complexity. Even assuming someone like vN could survive 16 years of extraordinarily deficient modern American schooling to begin an approach to academia, it would be for naught. Assuming his talent isn't passed over for belonging to a white male, he then joins a research group where he barely has access to his PI while investigating an extremely specific and relatively unimportant question for which funding was secured during the prior year. Use of equipment in deviation from this program is grounds for a grant audit. Regardless of results, the group must publish at least one paper per year to maintain funding. Data may be falsified. Graduate coursework is even more strictly defined than undergraduate majors, and interdisciplinary study is strongly discouraged, as his credit-hours would be supported through the department by an R/TA. There is simply no time for

Another reason why Dyson may have called von Neumann a prototypical frog is that the dominant path of von Neumann's work (at least the mathematical parts) was aimed towards solving specific problems. His early work on set theory and Hilbert's proof theory was aimed at providing a rigorous foundation for mathematics. Likewise, his mathematical foundations for quantum mechanics was aimed at providing a solid framework for quantum mechanics. After realising this framework would fail for quantum field theory[0][1], he invented more mathematics to try resolve this. From these attempts came his…

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