On Sat, Jun 8, 2013 at 7:51 PM, Chuck Grimes <[email protected]> wrote:

> Nice to see mention of John von Neumann. He is worth a study on his own. I
> read a bio of him a long time ago. Drank himself to death, but managed to
> remathematize society in the grand tradition of the French. Lagrange
> multipliers, Hamiltonians, not to mention Fourier Transforms, set theory,
> computers, etc. He was part of the Weimar emigre math group that did the
> wartime calculation tables for ballistics...somewhere in the basement of
> NYU
> under Richard Courant. They were also doing some of the number crunching
> for
> the Manhatten Project.
>



Julio,
I glanced through this chapter and it looks like an interesting project.
Look forward to reading it in more detail soon. But certainly a refreshing
alternative presentation as compared to, say, Samuelson.

Chuck,
You may wish to check out Philip Mirowski's "Machine Dreams", where von
Neumann's role in the post-war formulation of economic theory is treated in
considerable detail. This book is extremely dense and a very difficult read
and I don't feel competent to critique it in detail. But Mirowski's
intellectual range is nothing short of astonishing..
-raghu.
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