Von Neumann quotes:

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There are two kinds of people in the world: Johnny Von Neumann and the rest of us. -- Eugene Wigner
I see a bright future for the biotechnology industry when it follows the path of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized. -- Freeman Dyson
John von Neumann was the only student I was ever afraid of. -- George Polya
Use "entropy" and you can never lose a debate, von Neumann told Shannon - because no one really knows what "entropy" is. -- William Poundstone
... 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
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
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
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
All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control. Describing John von Neumann's aspiration for the application of computers sufficiently large to solve the problems of meteorology, despite the sensitivity of the weather to small perturbations. -- Freeman Dyson
As a mathematician, von Neumann was quick, brilliant, efficient, and enormously broad in scientific interests beyond mathematics itself. He knew his technical abilities; his virtuosity in following complicated reasoning and his insights were supreme; yet he lacked absolute self confidence. -- Stanislaw Ulam
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
In 1989, I was awarded the Von Neumann Prize in Operations Research Theory by the Operations Research Society of America and The Institute of Management Sciences. They cited my works in the areas of portfolio theory, sparse matrix techniques and the SIMSCRIPT programming language. -- Harry Markowitz
[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
...where were answers to the truly deep questions? Religion promised those, though always in vague terms, while retreating from one line in the sand to the next. Don't look past this boundary, they told Galileo, then Hutton, Darwin, Von Neumann, and Crick, always retreating with great dignity before the latest scientific advance, then drawing the next holy perimeter at the shadowy rim of knowledge. -- David Brin
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
There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. -- John von Neumann
Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin. -- John von Neumann
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
Pascal and C are special-purpose languages for manipulating the registers and memory of a von Neumann-style computer. -- Peter Norvig

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