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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
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John von Neumann
Age: 53 †
Born: 1903
Born: December 28
Died: 1957
Died: February 8
Chemist
Computer Scientist
Economist
Engineer
Inventor
Mathematician
Nuclear Physicist
Physicist
University Teacher
Buda Pest
John Von Neumann
Neumann
John von
Janos Lajos Neumann
János Lajos Neumann
von Neumann
Precisely
Machine
Machines
Tell
Cannot
Make
Always
More quotes by John von Neumann
Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.
John von Neumann
The calculus was the first achievement of modern mathematics and it is difficult to overestimate its importance. I think it defines more unequivocally than anything else the inception of modern mathematics and the system of mathematical analysis, which is its logical development, still constitutes the greatest technical advance in exact thinking.
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You wake me up early in the morning to tell me I am right? Please wait until I am wrong.
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All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.
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When we talk mathematics, we may be discussing a secondary language built on the primary language of the nervous system.
John von Neumann
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
I would like to make a confession which may seem immoral: I do not believe absolutely in Hilbert space any more.
John von Neumann
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
There probably is a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn't.
John von Neumann
You don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in.
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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
Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.
John von Neumann
There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about.
John von Neumann
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
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
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
Life is a process which may be abstracted from other media.
John von Neumann
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
If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.
John von Neumann
I am thinking about something much more important than bombs. I am thinking about computers.
John von Neumann
