I have come to suspect that to most people thinking is painful. Some of us are addicted to thinking. Some of us find it a necessity. Johnny enjoyed it. I even have the suspicion that he enjoyed almost nothing else.
I listened to Ananyo Bhattacharya's "The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann" in my car during the many commute hours Bay Area traffic afforded me. I thought I should share the Johnny phenomena here.
I knew about von Neumann being a very influential mathematician/scientist/engineer but the full list still left me bedazzled. In his 53 years of life (1903-1957), von Neumann seeded so many fields. Every time there was an important discovery in physics, mathematics or computation, John von Neumann was there. Set theory and the foundations of mathematics. The mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics. Operator algebras (still called von Neumann algebras). Ergodic theory. Game theory. Expected utility theory (which is the foundation of most of modern mathematical economics). The Monte Carlo method. The stored-program computer architecture that every machine you have ever touched is built on. Numerical weather prediction. Fault-tolerant computing. Self-reproducing automata (cellular automata), and arguably, the logical structure of molecular biology, four years before Watson and Crick. There is also, unfortunately, the implosion lens for the Nagasaki bomb, and a decade of hawkish nuclear strategy.
