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John von Neumann Quotes
1903–1957 Hungary
John von Neumann (28 December 1903 – 8 February 1957) was a Hungarian-American-Jewish mathematician, physicist, inventor, computer scientist, and polymath. He made major contributions to a number of fields, including mathematics (foundations of mathematics, functional analysis, ergodic theory, geometry, set theory, topology, and numerical analysis), physics (quantum mechanics, hydrodynamics and quantum statistical mechanics), economics (game theory), computing (Von Neumann architecture, linear programming, self-replicating machines, stochastic computing), and statistics.
Hungary Academics Anti-communists Computer scientists Economists Also known as: John Von Neumann
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23 quotes
Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.
If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.
With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.
Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.
When we talk mathematics, we may be discussing a secondary language built on the primary language of the nervous system.
There probably is a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn't.
I think that it is a relatively good approximation to truth — which is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations — that mathematical ideas originate in empirics.
Some people confess guilt to claim credit for the sin.
You wake me up early in the morning to tell me that I'm right? Please wait until I'm wrong.
Truth … is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.
In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.
If one has really technically penetrated a subject, things that previously seemed in complete contrast, might be purely mathematical transformations of each other.
You don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in.
The goys have proven the following theorem…
It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature.
For progress there is no cure.... The only safety possible is relative, and it lies in an intelligent exercise of day-to-day judgement.
If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o' clock, I say why not one o' clock?
It will not be sufficient to know that the enemy has only fifty possible tricks and that we can counter every one of them, but we must be able to counter them almost at the very instant they occur.
A large part of mathematics which becomes useful developed with absolutely no desire to be useful, and in a situation where nobody could possibly know in what area it would become useful; and there were no general indications that it ever would be so.
The Role of Mathematics in the Sciences and in Society (1954)
In some sense, nuclear fission is not one of those developments in physics which arose logically and systematically in the course of progress. There was a great deal of accident and surprise in the process.
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