Ishan Mukherjee

“Von Neumann’s remarkable foresight is evident in letters he wrote to Ortvay between 1928 and 1939. ‘There will be a war in Europe in the next decade,’ he told the Hungarian physicist in 1935, further predicting that America would enter the war ‘if England is in trouble’. He feared that during that war, European Jews would suffer a genocide as the Armenians had under the Ottoman Empire. In 1940, he predicted that Britain would be able to hold a German invasion at bay (far from obvious at the time), and that America would join the war the following year (as it did after the bombing of Pearl Harbor).”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“[Von Neumann's childhood home's] library’s centrepiece [was] the Allgemeine Geschichte, a massive history of the world edited by the German historian Wilhelm Oncken, which began in Ancient Egypt and concluded with a biography of Wilhelm I, the first German emperor, commissioned by the Kaiser himself. When von Neumann became embroiled in American politics after he emigrated, he would sometimes avoid arguments that were threatening to become too heated by citing (sometimes word for word) the outcome of some obscurely related affair in antiquity that he had read about in Oncken as a child.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Von Neumann enjoyed driving very much but had never passed a test. At Mariette’s suggestion, he bribed a driving examiner. This did nothing to improve his driving. He sped along crowded roads as if they were many-body problems to be negotiated by calculating the best route through on the fly. He often failed, and an intersection in Princeton was soon christened ‘von Neumann corner’ on account of the many accidents he had there. Bored on open roads, he slowed down. When conversation faltered, he would sing; swaying and rocking the steering wheel from side to side with him. The couple would buy a new car every year, usually because von Neumann had totalled the previous one. His vehicle of choice was a Cadillac, ‘because’, he explained whenever anyone asked, ‘no one would sell me a tank’. Miraculously, he escaped largely unscathed from these smash-ups, often returning with the unlikeliest of explanations. ‘I was proceeding down the road,’ begins one fabulous excuse. ‘The trees on the right were passing me in orderly fashion at 60 miles an hour. Suddenly one of them stepped in my path. Boom!”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“The best estimates of Trinity’s power put the figure somewhere between 20,000 and 22,000 tons. Oppenheimer reached for poetry, recalling a verse from ancient Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, which he had read in the original Sanskrit. ‘Now I am become Death,’ he said, ‘the destroyer of worlds.’ Bainbridge was pithier. ‘Now we are all sons of bitches,’ he told Oppenheimer.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann