Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War

**Ananyo Bhattacharya** (0:00)
I tried to lay out the context of this. I mean, this was after the most destructive war that the world had ever known. Millions of people had died.
And von Neumann had predicted this and the Holocaust very successfully years in advance. And he now was convinced that within a decade, there would be a Third World War with nuclear weapons.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:30)
Okay, today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Ananyo Bhattacharya, who is a science writer who has worked at The Economist and at Nature. And most recently, he's the author of The Man from the Future, The Visionary Life of John von Neumann. And it was an extremely enjoyable read, super interesting.
And so before we jump into the questions, Ananyo, I'm wondering if you can kind of give context to my audience and summarize the life of this giant.

**Ananyo Bhattacharya** (0:59)
Well, that's not an easy task, but I'll give it a go. So he was born in Budapest in around 1903 to this wealthy Jewish family. And pretty early on, they realized that there's something quite special about him. So he can do these long six-figure calculations in his head by six.
And he's learned calculus by eight, right? And he's teaching himself the finer points of set theory by kind of 11, right? So he's going on long walks with Eugene Wigner, who is a childhood friend of his and a future Nobel Prize winner. And Wigner is a year older than him, and he's teaching Wigner set theory at that age. So it's it's kind of clear that even among geniuses, as he would be later on at Los Alamos, for example, or at the Princeton and at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he'd be recruited along with Einstein, that he was kind of a cut above even all of these incredibly clever people. And, and so, yeah, so he grows up in this quite privileged Budapest surroundings.
Their home was often visited by the the greats of the time. It was an incredibly cultured city, and his father, Max, was a kind of successful banker. So they were quite wealthy. I mean, he was a self-made man, but he had, as a result, von Neumann, who was one of three brothers, actually, he was the eldest, he had the benefits of kind of a top flight education as well.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (3:00)
Yeah, so, you know, right before we did the interview, I was thinking about what, you know, I have a computer science degree, and I was thinking about, okay, what portion of my computer science degree can be traced back directly to von Neumann? I was just going through just like an initial glance at a few of the classes that I took where like a large part of the fraction of the content came from von Neumann, right? So you could like, okay, algorithms, linear programming, you know, merge sort, like probably like a quarter of my curriculum, quantum computing, you know, density, density matrix, von Neumann entropy, hardware, von Neumann, you know, the von Neumann architecture from other computers, you know, even like my organizational ethics class, you know, that game theory, that comes up, you know, theory of computing, you know, finite state machines, cellular automata. So like, it's astounding to me that this person is responsible for probably like a third of everything I learned in college, and so it was very interesting to then get to read the history of this person and the ideas that he came up with and interacted with. And now, one very interesting part about the context, context surrounding von Neumann's work is, you know, he was part of this group, as you talk about, called the Martians, they were Hungarian and Central European Jews who migrated the United States in the early 20th century.
And as Scott Alexander has a fun blog post title about this, he says, the nuclear bomb was a high school science project for a bunch of Hungarians, because a lot of the scientists worked on the nuclear bomb were part, like went to the same high school. So what was the cultural or other factors that made this group of people so, I mean, so many geniuses?

**Ananyo Bhattacharya** (4:45)
Right, so they were all Jewish.
And von Neumann attributed this kind of pressure to succeed to growing up in kind of Central Europe between the two world wars, being surrounded by sort of anti semitism, and Budapest was relatively tolerant, but it was in the air of Central Europe at the time. And he said that he felt a pressure to succeed or face extinction. I mean, they were constantly under this huge, relentless kind of psychological pressure to kind of do the impossible. And you know, von Neumann in his letters from 1930, by which time he's safely in the in the US, he's predicting disaster, he predicts pretty accurately that there will be a second world war and he predicts that European Jews will face extinction.