John Neumann Quotes

#1. Life is a process which may be abstracted from other media.

John Von Neumann

#2. When we talk mathematics, we may be discussing a secondary language built on the primary language of the nervous system.

John Von Neumann

#3. You don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in.

John Von Neumann

#4. There probably is a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn't.

John Von Neumann

#5. Running overtime is the one unforgivable error a lecturer can make. After fifty minutes (one microcentury as von Neumann used to say) everybody's attention will turn elsewhere.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#6. If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.

John Von Neumann

#7. Well, the cigar I smoke takes two hours."

"When a man loves a woman....O to have such a lover..."

"I gave up a $100,000 lifestyle to take this position!

John Neumann

#8. Kurt Godel's achievement in modern logic is singular and monumental - indeed it is more than a monument, it is a landmark which will remain visible far in space and time ... The subject of logic has certainly completely changed its nature and possibilities with Godel's achievement.

John Von Neumann

#9. The total subject of mathematics is clearly too broad for any of us. I do not think that any mathematician since Gauss has covered it uniformly and fully; even Hilbert did not and all of us are of considerably lesser width quite apart from the question of depth than Hilbert.

John Von Neumann

#10. Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

John Von Neumann

#11. Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.

John Von Neumann

#12. It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.

John Von Neumann

#13. There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about

John Von Neumann

#14. All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.

John Von Neumann

#15. You wake me up early in the morning to tell me I am right? Please wait until I am wrong.

John Von Neumann

#16. There is no point in being precise if you do not even know what you are talking about.

John Von Neumann

#17. I would like to make a confession which may seem immoral: I do not believe in Hilbert space anymore.

John Von Neumann

#18. In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them. - John von Neumann

Ray Kurzweil

#19. Problems are often stated in vague terms ... because it is quite uncertain what the problems really are.

John Von Neumann

#20. Although Oppenheimer's mind was not the whiz-bang computer of a John von Neumann or the astral navigation system of a Hans Bethe, it processed other men's original contributions so adeptly that for multifaceted excellence it may well have been the finest scientific instrument of all.

Algis Valiunas

#21. Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.

John Von Neumann

#22. If one has really technically penetrated a subject, things that previously seemed in complete contrast, might be purely mathematical transformations of each other.

John Von Neumann

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

George Polya

#24. You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that.

John Von Neumann

#25. Computers are like humans - they do everything except think.

John Von Neumann

#26. The most vitally characteristic fact about mathematics is, in my opinion, its quite peculiar relationship to the natural sciences, or more generally, to any science which interprets experience on a higher than purely descriptive level.

John Von Neumann

#27. It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature.

John Von Neumann

#28. Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.

John Von Neumann

#29. After preliminary work by a number of other distinguished mathematicians and economists, game theory as a systematic theory started with von Neumann and Morgenstern's book, 'Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,' published in 1944.

John Harsanyi

#30. He [John von Neumann] had the invaluable faculty of being able to take the most difficult problem and separate it into its components, whereupon everything looked brlliantly simple.

Stanislaw Ulam

#31. The emphasis on mathematical methods seems to be shifted more towards combinatorics and set theory - and away from the algorithm of differential equations which dominates mathematical physics.

John Von Neumann

#32. I am thinking about something much more important than bombs. I am thinking about computers.

John Von Neumann

#33. Technological possibilities are irresistible to man. If man can go to the moon, he will. If he can control the climate, he will.

John Von Neumann

#34. John von Neumann draws attention to what seemed to him a contrast. He remarked that for simple mechanisms, it is often easier to describe how they work than what they do, while for more complicated mechanisms, it is usually the other way around.

Edsger Dijkstra

#35. Science, as well as technology, will in the near and in the farther future increasingly turn from problems of intensity, substance, and energy, to problems of structure, organization, information, and control.

John Von Neumann