John Von Neumann

[FDG]

What do you guys think for him?

My guess is ENTj. Later I'll give some thoughts about.





quotes:

You wake me up early in the morning to tell me that I'm right? Please wait until I'm wrong.

When we talk mathematics, we may be discussing a secondary language built on the primary language of the nervous system.

If one has really technically penetrated a subject, things that previously seemed in complete contrast, might be purely mathematical transformations of each other.

Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

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. But, once they are conceived, the subject begins to live a peculiar life of its own and is … governed by almost entirely aesthetical motivations. In other words, at a great distance from its empirical source, or after much "abstract" inbreeding, a mathematical subject is in danger of degeneration. Whenever this stage is reached the only remedy seems to me to be the rejuvenating return to the source: the reinjection of more or less directly empirical ideas.

You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. 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.

Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin. For, as has been pointed out several times, there is no such thing as a random number — there are only methods to produce random numbers, and a strict arithmetic procedure of course is not such a method.

There probably is a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn't.

About Von Neumann: "Von Neumann had an absolute paranoia about the Russians and favored a first nuclear strike. Einstein referred to him as a Denktier, a think animal." - Jeremy Bernstein.
"He was a really remarkable man. He listened to me talk about this rather obscure subject and in ten minutes he knew more about it than I did. He was extremely quick." - David Blackwell