Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Under guard on his deathbed
Claude Shannon met the great minds of his era and ranked von Neumann as the smartest person he ever met. The two served together as scientific advisers to the NSA. Scientists like them also advised the CIA and the defense department, and Shannon stayed reluctant to talk about that work even decades later.
The deathbed guard gives an idea of how classified it was. Von Neumann's mind was impressive, but the government feared it was not immune to infiltration. A medically induced haze seemed to them the perfect moment for someone to slip in and take the precious state secrets it held.
So uniformed personnel stood watch over him around the clock, to make sure nobody hacked his brain.
How did von Neumann shape the computer?
In 1945 he wrote the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, which described a computer that keeps its program in the same memory as its data. That layout, now called the von Neumann architecture, is used by nearly all modern general-purpose computers. He wrote it while consulting on the ENIAC and EDVAC projects at the University of Pennsylvania. He later oversaw construction of his own machine at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Why did governments recruit mathematicians?
Code breaking, ballistics, and bomb design all demand heavy mathematics. At Los Alamos, von Neumann worked on the implosion design of the plutonium bomb and on the calculations behind it. The National Security Agency was founded in 1952, and mathematicians like him sat on its advisory bodies in the following years.
How did game theory enter military strategy?
In 1928 von Neumann proved the minimax theorem, which shows that in a two-player zero-sum game each player has a best strategy. In 1944 he published Theory of Games and Economic Behavior with the economist Oskar Morgenstern. The RAND Corporation, where von Neumann consulted, applied game theory to Cold War nuclear strategy in the 1950s.
More from Founders
