The source
The exact words
“If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.”
Franz L. Alt, “Archaeology of computers: Reminiscences, 1945–1947”. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 15, No. 7, July 1972, p. 694, recalling von Neumann's keynote at the first national meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1947.
The line survives through one witness. Franz Alt, a founder of the ACM, recalled it twenty-five years later at the end of his reminiscences for the society's anniversary issue. It is his memory of a spoken remark, not a sentence von Neumann wrote down.
The story
Why Neumann said it
In 1947 the people building the first electronic computers founded a society of their own, the Association for Computing Machinery. There was no better keynote speaker than John von Neumann. Two years earlier his report on the EDVAC had described the design almost every computer still follows, a single memory holding both the program and the data, and at Princeton he was building a machine of his own.
Franz Alt, one of the society's founders and later its president, was in the audience. When the ACM marked its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1972, he wrote down what he remembered of those first years and ended with this remark from von Neumann's talk. It is the only source for it, so the wording is Alt's recollection.
The idea runs through von Neumann's whole career. Mathematics looked simple to him because he could see the rules, and he spent his life trying to bring the same clarity to messier things: poker and economics in the Theory of Games, the weather on the first computers, the logic of living cells that copy themselves. Life was the hard problem. Mathematics was the tool that made a piece of it tractable.
The EDVAC report has been reprinted as a design object, and it is one of the picks in our list of science books that print like design objects. For a mathematician who believed every question would one day be answered, read Hilbert's “we must know, we will know”.
Mathematician
Who was John von Neumann?
- Born
- 28 December 1903, Budapest
- Died
- 8 February 1957, Washington
- Known for
- Game theory, the stored-program computer
- Said it
- ACM keynote, 1947
John von Neumann was born in Budapest and was recognized as a prodigy almost at once. By his mid-twenties he had done fundamental work in set theory and the mathematics of quantum mechanics. He moved to Princeton in 1930 and became one of the first professors at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1933.
He founded game theory with Oskar Morgenstern, worked on the Manhattan Project, wrote the report that defined the stored-program computer, and pioneered numerical weather prediction and the theory of self-reproducing automata. Colleagues regularly called him the fastest mind they had ever met. He died of cancer in Washington in 1957, at 53.
Read next
The Man from the Future
Ananyo Bhattacharya · 2021
A lively biography that follows von Neumann's ideas rather than just his life: quantum mechanics, the bomb, the computer, game theory and self-replicating machines, and how each still shapes the world.
Questions
About this quote
Where did von Neumann say mathematics is simple compared with life?
In his keynote at the first national meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1947. The remark is known from Franz L. Alt's reminiscences in Communications of the ACM, July 1972.
Are these von Neumann's exact words?
They are Franz Alt's recollection of a spoken remark, written down twenty-five years later. No earlier written source has been found.
What did von Neumann mean?
That mathematics only seems hard because people compare it with nothing. Next to the real world, with its economies, weather and living things, the mathematics is the simple part.
