It is fun, if entirely subjective, to speculate who the greatest people in history are. For example, many consider Wilt Chamberlain the greatest athlete ever — a giant of immense power and agility, who was also a world-class track and field star.
Who is the most innovative scientist ever? An obvious choice would be Albert Einstein, who revolutionized physics in 1905 by publishing four groundbreaking papers: on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity and the equivalence of mass and energy.
Another 20th century scientist deserves serious consideration. John von Neumann, who was born in 1903 in Hungary and died in 1957 in the U.S., never won a Nobel Prize. But his accomplishments across multiple disciplines are breathtaking. He had about 125 major scientific innovations.
Von Neumann, who moved to the U.S. in 1930, also was charismatic, lovable, drove fast cars (badly), and was a notoriously hard partier across multiple continents, according to several biographies of him.
Von Neumann revolutionized one subdiscipline of math and physics after another, while playing a key role in creating game theory and computing. Einstein somewhat pales in comparison, revolutionizing physics as a young man and not innovating significantly the next 50 years of his life despite extensive efforts to create a unified theory of physics.
Here are some of von Neumann’s accomplishments:
Mathematics. In his 20’s, he revolutionized set theory, ergodic theory and continuous geometry — all major disciplines of theoretical mathematics. A child prodigy, he studied math and physics on the side while pursuing an advanced degree in chemical engineering, to please his businessman father.
Physics. Von Neumann published a set of papers which established a rigorous mathematical framework for quantum mechanics.
Game theory. Von Neumann laid the foundation for the new field of game theory as a mathematical discipline.
The Manhattan Project. Von Neumann became a leading authority on the mathematics of shaped charges, explosive charges shaped to focus the effect of the energy of an explosive. He was instrumental in the design of the second atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki.
Computing. In 1945, von Neumann proposed a computer architecture now known as the von Neumann architecture, which included the basics of an electronic digital computer. It is the foundation of modern computing.
DNA/Artificial Life. He created the field of cellular automata through his rigorous mathematical treatment of the structure of self-replication, which preceded the discovery of DNA by several years.
Artificial Intelligence. Von Neumann proposed the concept of a “learning machine” that could improve its performance over time by learning from its experiences, which led to machine learning.
Open source. About the 75th most impressive thing von Neumann did was create open-source computing. Some of the early computing vendors he consulted to attempted to make his architectural innovations proprietary. He fought back legally and won in a three-year federal trial, creating the industry precedent that core IT innovations belonged to society, not individual firms.
Why didn’t von Neumann win a Nobel? He envisioned entire new disciplines and created their mathematical foundations. He solved revolutionary problems and then left them to be fleshed out by others, moving on to entirely new areas of study.
Is there a lesson here? Not really, any more than Wilt. But it is breathtaking to consider that there are genetic outliers like Chamberlain and von Neumann scattered around the globe.
Several first-rate biographies of von Neumann have been written, one last year, “The Man From the Future” by Ananyo Bhattacharya.