John von Neumann Quotes
With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.
Dyson, Freeman. "A meeting with Enrico Fermi." Nature, vol. 427, no. 6972, 2004, p. 297.
Fifty years later there would literally be hundreds of millions of computers in the world each one of which computed more things about the affairs of people than all the computers in the entire world were capable of when Bush wrote this.
He had standard barometers made and distributed widely, accumulating the data and predicting the weather. Although crude and inaccurate by modern standards, his system was a vast improvement over earlier efforts. Today, we use the term for economics and politics as well.
Historically, in the first half of the 20th century, nuclear scientists discovered that probability governed and was necessary for understanding quantum mechanics—the laws of physics governing tiny objects like atoms, electrons, protons and even quarks. To many, this seemed a contradiction in that it was hard to conceive particles following laws and yet behaving randomly at the same time. However, it did not take long before all the scientists adjusted their thinking and learned to live and work with that was then a type of contradiction but is no longer thought so as men and women have learned to think in a new way. This quotation illustrates that the greatest scientists in the world, in a very short period of time, had to change their entire mode of thinking. There were no real holdouts or “conservatives” who wanted to maintain the older values. This would never happen in politics, where change is not accepted very quickly.
Stockman was the member of the Reagan staff who was in charge of the budget. He admitted that neither he nor any of the other staff or officials really understood the complexities of the United States budget. It had become so huge and complicated that it is likely that no one person was capable of understanding it any longer. However, Stockman, a brilliant man, has been the only OMB Budget Director to admit his lack of total understanding. He was fired from his job for his candor.
John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. Von Neumann was generally regarded as the foremost mathematician of his time and said to be "the last representative of the great mathematicians". He integrated pure and applied sciences.
