The Smartest Man in the World

While I don't fully understand it, my economics and politcal science classes exposed me to game theory, and now I'm very intrigued by it. The whole methodology of studying how people act in a strategic situations appeals to both the junior economist and the pop sociologist in me. Today, when I was listening to an interview with Tim Harford, he talks about one of the founders of game theory, a man named Jon von Neumann. von Neumann was actually a Hungarian-Jewish mathematician who was regarded, in his time, as one of the most brilliant men on the planet, and that's not a title that gets thrown around a bit, but here it may be warranted. He did make contributions to economics, physics, astrophysics, computer science, and mathematics and came up with such cool names for his work, like artificial viscosity. von Neumann was believed to have been blessed with near total recall, and his ideas and theories are used in so many facets of science and technology its incredible.

In the interview I listened to with Harford, however, he mentions that once when von Neumann was putting Albert Einstein on a train, he put Einstein on a train going the wrong way. It kind of lowers the bar for "Smartest Man in the World" a bit.

To finish this fetishized tribute to von Neumann, I'll conclude with two quotes of his that I enjoy. One is a kind of meta philosophical idea, and the second is included because while I like game theory, I'm awful at math.

"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations."

"In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them."