A Beautiful Mind

We may never have noticed, but John von Neumann has affected our everyday lives in many more ways than Freud or Einstein ever could

Who was the most intelligent man of the last 100 years? The only time I have written a letter to a magazine as an adult was in response to one of Time’s millennial issues celebrating the greatest thinkers and scientists of the 20th century. I thought it had overlooked the most titanic of them. The letter was never published, though I got an auto-reply email thanking me for my interest in Time.

John von Neumann, the Hungarian-born mathematician, was born in 1903 and died in 1957. He made major contributions to set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, geometry, economics and game theory, computer science, numerical analysis, hydrodynamics of explosions, and statistics. He was a key member of the Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear bomb. And after World War II, he was part of the team that developed the theory of thermonuclear explosions, and the hydrogen bomb. He was one of the few people, along with Einstein, appointed when the Institute for Advanced Study was set up at Princeton University. During the Cold War, von Neumann, violently anti-Communist, was an important advisor to the US government on military strategy against the Soviet bloc, due to his expertise in game theory. He loved his drink, had an eye for women, and was a lousy driver.

Von Neumann’s largest contribution was to game theory, a branch of applied mathematics that is used in economics, biology, engineering, political science, international relations, defence planning, computer science and philosophy. Game theory attempts to mathematically capture behaviour in strategic situations, in which an individual’s success in making choices depends on the choices of others. While initially developed to analyse competitions in which one individual does better at another’s expense (zero-sum games), it has been expanded to treat a wide class of interactions between many players. John Nash, the subject of the Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind, was working on games involving large numbers of players when he lost his mental stability.

Consider this. Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction and visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies against the other and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full ten-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act?

If we assume that each player cares only about minimising his own time in jail, then the prisoner’s dilemma forms a non-zero-sum game in which two players may each cooperate with or betray the other. As in all game theory, the only concern of each individual player is maximising his own payoff, without any concern for the other player’s payoff. And the funny thing is: rational choice leads the two players to betray the other, even though each player’s individual reward would be greater if he did not. This is the prisoner’s dilemma, the simplest and most well-known game theory problem.

I am not aware of any man other than Leonardo da Vinci who had so many multiple types of intelligence. Newton and Einstein spent their lives in one field of activity. Freud and Marx changed the way we looked at our world, but again, they stayed put in their respective areas.

Von Neumann’s name is not well-known outside scientific and academic circles, because his discoveries and inventions cannot be summed up in simple and elegant equations like F=ma or e=mc2. He is the scientist’s scientist. But if he had not been around, we would not have had either the hydrogen bomb or the computer as we know it today, and a vast chunk of economic theory would be missing. Even though we never notice, von Neumann’s mind touches our lives, fears and world every day. Time should not have missed him.

About The Author

Sandipan Deb

Sandipan Deb is an IIT-IIM graduate who wandered into journalism after reading a quote from filmmaker George Lucas — “Everyone cage door is open” — and has stayed there (in journalism, not a cage) for the past 19 years. He has written a book on the IITs.