Klára Dán von Neumann | Hacker News Reader

Klára Dán von Neumann

en.wikipedia.org

168 pointspietroppeter52 comments

> They were at a casino in Monte Carlo when Dán met her future husband, John von Neumann, for the first time. He explained that he had perfected a way to ensure that you could win roulette every time, and promptly lost all his money trying to prove his point.

Magnificent. I can't explain why I'm so delighted by this, but the mental image makes me happy.

You left out the next sentence, which was hilarious too: "Afterwards, he asked Dán to buy him a drink."

She must have been instantly smitten, what a charmer.

This is the most hilarious "meet cute" I've ever read.

This implies that JvN was a gambler , but not a computer*

(*) Okay, not a 1980s-level computer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie

)

This was an earlier husband of hers, not von Neumann.

Yes, the first husband was an inveterate gambler, but she did meet JvN in a casino too, with an absurd story.

We know him for his researches in games of chance (& skill), but here he definitely took his chances :)

"Chess is not a game. Chess is computation." --JvN

Oops, I wasn't reading carefully and got this wrong -- this was in fact von Neumann.

It is a fun story but it does not have to be true.

I think von Neumann would understand some basic probability already by then.

Or maybe not? But at least there is a non-zero probability that it did not happen like that.

Sure, he would have known probability, but apparently he knew how to make up a good story to charm someone.

Sounds like his losses were a good investment.

By that time he'd already created the foundations for game theory with his minimax theorem of zero-sum games. I think its more likely that he knew was he was doing and expected to lose the money.

Old roulette wheels had large flaws, even in the 1960s: https://thehustle.co/professor-who-beat-roulette. 30 years earlier they must have been worse. So there is a chance he noticed some anomaly that he tried to exploit.

That article was a good read. That is a possibility.

I wonder if it was the basic gambler’s fallacy- which to be honest I still can’t grasp. I fully understand that conceptually every roll is completely independent and red/black is always ~50/50, but it’s very rare to see 20 straight black rolls in a row. Can someone try and explain it (if there even is anything to explain)?

Easier to explain with coin flips. Let’s say we do 100 flips - we know the “most likely” thing to happen is 50 heads and 50 tails. The actual probability of that is C(100, 50) / 2^100 = 0.079.

So about an 8% chance. You’re significantly more likely (ie 92% chance) to see _something else_. And that’s _the most_ likely outcome.

So tldr - it’s not so much that “you never see an all tails sequence in practice” - you’re actually unlikely to see any particular sequence. All the probabilities get astonishingly low very quickly.

Another point is that roulette is never 50/50 for red/black (there are 0, and sometimes 00 which are uncolored)

> Her family was wealthy, and often held parties where Dán would meet many different people from various stations in life.

Family wealth is often ignored in various scientists' biographies. It makes it easier to do science without the pressures of having to think about where the next cheque is going to come from.

Generally, a lot of the article has the feel of rewriting the past in order please a modern political discourse.

I didn't really get that (I only skimmed the article). However, it uses a lot of flowery language, which doesn't seem very WP:NPOV.

The character of the language you describe is indeed what gave me that exact feel.

I don’t feel like what I read between the lines of her life and the tone of this article are terribly in line.

What discourse would that be?

Same question here.

The DEI discourse.

> This article is missing information about Work and Notable Achievements.

> The DEI discourse.

I don't see DEI mentioned in the article anywhere.

> > This article is missing information about Work and Notable Achievements.

What is the point of highlighting this string?

What makes you expect that the DEI discourse should be mentioned in the article? - it is after all, well, discourse.

Then it's not clear what your point is.

You still haven't explained your point.

Exhibit one:

> During this time she also wrote the code for the first computer simulation of the Monte Carlo method, which is a method to store and analyze large quantities of data and make predictions on everything from elections to COVID-19 trend forecasting.

UBI, FTW.-

  PS. I get that UBI is controversial.-

Not only in the hard sciences…

I always smirk when reminded that anti-capitalist Karl Marx never held a job but was always funded by his family-money rich bourgeoisie friend, and married a rich Scotland royal decendant

I've seen her unpublished memoir, A Grasshopper in Very Tall Grass, quoted in quite a few places and it definitely seems worth publishing, such a shame no publisher has taken any interest in it yet.

Any idea how it was quoted without being published?

Marina vN Whitman had the book in her possession so I suppose they visited her and got access to it that way. I emailed her back in 2022 about it and she said she was planning on sending it to Josh Levy at the Library of Congress to go with the von Neumann/Klara papers there but I don't know how that ended up going, perhaps the book might be there now.

In a similar fashion Vincent Ford, who was the Air Force colonel responsible for von Neumann when he was in hospital dying of cancer, published a manuscript, Twenty-Four Minutes To Checkmate, on the US crash program for ICBMs focusing on the 1953-1957 period, which obviously overlaps a lot with when von Neumann was involved in those topics. It's held in the Dwight Eisenhower Library in Kansas however it's also only available if you visit in person.

It would be a great boost to the history of science if both texts were either published or scanned and uploaded online to make them significantly more accessible to both scholars and interested laypersons.

My Dad knew John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. My Dad liked him, saying von Neumann worked really late, played loud German music, and was eccentric. I wonder is Klara was as eccentric?

Wow. I wonder what its like to mest JvN in person. How eccentric would he be?

“For decades after this, society would devalue the work of programming, which ultimately allowed women to be a large part of the workforce.” – fascinating

It’s more that women already did a lot of human computing work, and programming was seen as being in the same league — which IMO isn’t actually that wrong, for the kind of mathematical batch programming this is about. If anything, maybe the human computing work was undervalued to start with.

I had an elementary school teacher (decades ago now, and she was old then) bring in her programming material from when she was basically fresh out of college. I don't even think she was using punch cards*, it was weird...but every one of her coworkers was a woman because it was considered rote work for secretary types.

* My memory is really fuzzy on this, but IIRC they had 1-2" holes in sheets that would either be transparent or black. Looking back they may have had some sort optical setup to read raw binary. I've never run into this since then (never really looked for it though either). She may have worked at IBM. I'd be interested if anyone knew what I was talking about.

interesting death. walked into the ocean?

Virginia Woolf died in a similar way. The first two "A start is born" movies ended with ocean deaths. Then there is Moe's Swigmore University professor.

And Harold Holt, PM of Australia.

Wow I used to go surfing all over LA Jolla. Did not know someone so notable died this way. Feel like there should be a plaque or something on the beach in question

What would the plaque say?

"Beware of shark"

Now I need to know why

She was with John for a pretty long time, I wonder if she didn't want to live without him

She did re-marry after Johns death.

Tragically, her father also committed suicide. Mental health is not something that was as well respected back then as it is now.

Much is said about John von Neumann but I had not yet heard about Klara. Thanks for sharing this.

The technical report on the ENIAC is an awesome read.

good book with some related anecdotes: The MANIAC

> She died in 1963 when she drove from her home in La Jolla to the beach and walked into the surf and drowned. The San Diego coroner's office listed her death as a suicide.

now that's impressive.

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