Von Neumann Quotes

Von Neumann Quote of the day

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.'

There are two kinds of people in the world: Johnny Von Neumann and the rest of us.

John von Neumann was the only student I was ever afraid of.

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.

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.

... The approach of von Neumann and Connes to the use of non-commutative algebra in physics is naive, the situation is much more complicated.

Use "entropy" and you can never lose a debate, von Neumann told Shannon - because no one really knows what "entropy" is.

Pascal and C are special-purpose languages for manipulating the registers and memory of a von Neumann-style computer.

Robert von Neumann taught painting, and when I finally got into a painting class of his, he reacted in much the same way.

Those two teachers [Kathleen Blackshear and Robert von Neumann] were just fantastic, I thought. They never directed you in a single direction, but they just encouraged you to think for yourself.

Most people avoid thinking if they can, some of us are addicted to thinking, but Von Neumann actually enjoyed thinking, maybe even to the exclusion of everything else.