A Quote by Eugene Wigner

There are two kinds of people in the world: Johnny Von Neumann and the rest of us.

Eugene Wigner

Quote Topics

Johnny Kinds People Rest Two Us Von Von Neumann World

Quote Author

Eugene Wigner
American - Physicist
November 17, 1902 - January 1, 1995

John von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of von Neumann's advice. It's made me a very happy man ever since. But it was von Neumann who put the seed in that grew into my active irresponsibility!

Richard P. Feynman

There was a seminar for advanced students in Zürich that I was teaching and von Neumann was in the class. I came to a certain theorem, and I said it is not proved and it may be difficult. Von Neumann didn't say anything but after five minutes he raised his hand. When I called on him he went to the blackboard and proceeded to write down the proof. After that I was afraid of von Neumann.

George Polya

I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, 'with four parameters I can fit an elephant and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.'

Enrico Fermi

My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it 'information,' but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it 'uncertainty.' When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, 'You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.'

Claude Shannon

Von Neumann languages do not have useful properties for reasoning about programs. Axiomatic and denotational semantics are precise tools for describing and understanding conventional programs, but they only talk about them and cannot alter their ungainly properties. Unlike von Neumann languages, the language of ordinary algebra is suitable both for stating its laws and for transforming an equation into its solution, all within the "language."

John Backus

The two teachers that I had in the Art Institute who affected me the most were Kathleen Blackshear and Robert von Neumann; Kathleen Blackshear because she taught a class called design - I can't remember, design something, and in this class - it met once a week - we would do work centered around some theme, word or subject or technique or whatever, and bring it in for a three-hour discussion. And Kathleen was able, in watching and looking at our work, to direct us to all kinds of things which might relate to what we were trying to do, but she never attempted to tell us what to do.

Warren MacKenzie

The most spectacular thing about Johnny [von Neumann] was not his power as a mathematician, which was great, or his insight and his clarity, but his rapidity; he was very, very fast. And like the modern computer, which no longer bothers to retrieve the logarithm of 11 from its memory (but, instead, computes the logarithm of 11 each time it is needed), Johnny didn't bother to remember things. He computed them. You asked him a question, and if he didn't know the answer, he thought for three seconds and would produce and answer.

Paul Halmos

Those two teachers [Kathleen Blackshear and Robert von Neumann] were just fantastic, I thought. They never directed you in a single direction, but they just encouraged you to think for yourself.

Warren MacKenzie

John von Neumann was the only student I was ever afraid of.

George Polya

Pascal and C are special-purpose languages for manipulating the registers and memory of a von Neumann-style computer.

Peter Norvig

... The approach of von Neumann and Connes to the use of non-commutative algebra in physics is naive, the situation is much more complicated.

Israel Gelfand

I don't own any of these names. I don't own Johnny World, Johnny Mundo, John Morrison, Johnny Nitro, Johnny Blaze or Johnny Impact. None of it.

John Morrison

In desperation I asked Fermi whether he was not impressed by the agreement between our calculated numbers and his measured numbers. He replied, "How many arbitrary parameters did you use for your calculations?" I thought for a moment about our cut-off procedures and said, "Four." He said, "I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." With that, the conversation was over.

Freeman Dyson

There are only two kinds of people in the modern world who know what they are after. One, quite frankly, is the Communist. The other, equally frankly, is the convinced Christian. The rest of the world are amiable nonentities.