[HN Gopher] Klara Dan von Neumann
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Klara Dan von Neumann
Author : pietroppeter
Score : 135 points
Date : 2024-06-28 03:08 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| paulpauper wrote:
| interesting death. walked into the ocean?
| BuzzVII wrote:
| 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.
| gumby wrote:
| And Harold Holt, PM of Australia.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| 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
| otteromkram wrote:
| What would the plaque say?
| moffkalast wrote:
| "Beware of shark"
| theragra wrote:
| Now I need to know why
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| She was with John for a pretty long time, I wonder if she
| didn't want to live without him
| hnlmorg wrote:
| 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.
| rjmill wrote:
| > They were at a casino in Monte Carlo when Dan 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.
| roenxi wrote:
| You left out the next sentence, which was hilarious too:
| "Afterwards, he asked Dan to buy him a drink."
|
| She must have been instantly smitten, what a charmer.
| QuesnayJr wrote:
| This is the most hilarious "meet cute" I've ever read.
| vinnyvichy wrote:
| 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
|
| )
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| This was an earlier husband of hers, not von Neumann.
| gumby wrote:
| Yes, the first husband was an inveterate gambler, but she
| did meet JvN in a casino too, with an absurd story.
| vinnyvichy wrote:
| 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
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| Oops, I wasn't reading carefully and got this wrong -- this
| was in fact von Neumann.
| fifilura wrote:
| 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.
| gumby wrote:
| 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.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| 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.
| in3d wrote:
| 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.
| josefrichter wrote:
| "For decades after this, society would devalue the work of
| programming, which ultimately allowed women to be a large part of
| the workforce." - fascinating
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| surfingdino wrote:
| > Her family was wealthy, and often held parties where Dan 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.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| Generally, a lot of the article has the feel of rewriting the
| past in order please a modern political discourse.
| 1f60c wrote:
| 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.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| The character of the language you describe is indeed what
| gave me that exact feel.
| rottencupcakes wrote:
| I don't feel like what I read between the lines of her
| life and the tone of this article are terribly in line.
| MiguelX413 wrote:
| What discourse would that be?
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| Same question here.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| The DEI discourse.
|
| > This article is missing information about Work and
| Notable Achievements.
| nayuki wrote:
| 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.
| Bluestein wrote:
| UBI, FTW.-
| Bluestein wrote:
| PS. I get that UBI is controversial.-
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| 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
| mjreacher wrote:
| 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.
| johnloeber wrote:
| Any idea how it was quoted without being published?
| mjreacher wrote:
| 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.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| 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?
| dnlserrano wrote:
| good book with some related anecdotes: The MANIAC
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| 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.
| 2-3-7-43-1807 wrote:
| > 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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