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0 pointsacheron11y ago0 comments

Not disagreeing with you necessarily, but the 70s were hardly an economic boom time in the USA either.

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And von Neumann lived mostly though war and 30's financial crisis. I honestly think it's more a question of (lack of) will/confidence from part of academia. I bet if had really good ideas about new languages and really wanted to dig deep on that he would be able to do so without starving.

Maryam Mirzakhani (this year's female fields Medalist) commented that she's quite a slow thinker, and left a clear impression that it's more a matter of asking important questions and actually trying to solve them with perseverence. It's just far more secure to chase the low-hanging fruits.

http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140812-a-tenacious-...

" Another notable and enviable trait of von Neumann's was his mathematical courage. If, in the middle of a search for a counterexample, an infinite series came up, with a lot of exponentials that had quadratic exponents, many mathematicians would start with a clean sheet of paper and look for another counterexample. Not Johnny! When that happened to him, he cheerfully said: "Oh, yes, a thetafunction...", and plowed ahead with the mountainous computations. He wasn't afraid of anything."

That's an inspiration!

tachyonbeam11y ago

My understanding is that during the war, the american government was throwing money around liberally. Trying to do everything it could to outwit and outdo the enemy. This is part of what caused the post-war economic boom, money being distributed and more people getting a chance to prosper.

xrange11y ago

My understanding is that after the war, the rest of the world needed to buy stuff, but the U.S. was the only major country with an intact manufacturing base. So that's why the U.S. made 30.5% the world's manufactured goods exports in 1948, compared to 15.3% in 1938. See table XXIII on page 52 of:

http://unstats.un.org/unsd/trade/imts/Historical%20data%2019...

e12e11y ago

Makes one wonder what the NSA have been doing since the 80s. They're supposed to be the biggest employer of mathematicians, and since the 90s they've had their very own "war budget". Maybe in 2050 we'll say -- oh wow, look at all the great stuff that came out of the islamophobic-fuelled war on the middle east that the US spearheaded. Shame about the future ruined for half a billion people, but boy did they come up with some crazy stuff at the NSA!

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dragonwriter11y ago

OTOH, the time when Lisp (1958), Smalltalk (1969), and ML (1973 is what Wikipedia has for "first appeared in", but unlike Lisp and and Smalltalk I can't find information on definition vs. release) were first defined all (except the last, which is on the cusp) precede the 1973 recession, and the preceding period actually was an economic boom time.

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