I got access to over a dozen unpublished documents by John von Neumann.
[...]
Some particularly interesting passages:
Von Neumann on reviewing a student’s work—“I have made an honest effort to formulate my objections as little brutally as possible” [Original / German / English]
A young von Neumann very politely asking for a warm intro to Schrödinger, then 39 years old [Original / German / English]
Von Neumann presenting a very significant result, the “Von Neumann’s mean ergodic theorem”, to his mentor. Fascinatingly, he also expresses concern in this 1931 letter from princeton that “[the USA] looks roughly like Germany in 1927″ [Original / German / English]
See also: Methodology and Code for the transcription/translation via GPT-5-Thinking and Claude-Sonnet-4.5.[1]
They likely accessed these via ETH Zurich’s library.[2]
For the third passage, he was not comparing the USA in general with Germany in general. He was comparing the stagnation of progress in theoretical physics:
Dirac is here, which benefits the physics here greatly, although it does not remedy the depression of theoretical physics. —
...
The general depression that prevails here and is certainly sufficiently well known to you, nonetheless, measured by European standards, it is still “God’s own country”. Somewhat frightening, though, is that it looks roughly like Germany in 1927, so that one does not quite clearly see whether the amplitude of the depression is different, or only the phase. Perhaps it is the amplitude after all.
In February I will be back in Europe, and at the end of April in Berlin.
some previously-unpublished letters from John von Neumann: https://johnvon.com/
https://johnvon.com (clickable link)
Lukas Münzel (who made this project):
See also: Methodology and Code for the transcription/translation via GPT-5-Thinking and Claude-Sonnet-4.5.[1]
They likely accessed these via ETH Zurich’s library.[2]
They used
gpt-5(line 14 & line 83) and gpt-5 in API = gpt-5-thinking in system card. Claude in line 46. ↩︎Lukas studies at ETH Zurich. HS 91:682 is in ETH Zurich’s library ↩︎
For the third passage, he was not comparing the USA in general with Germany in general. He was comparing the stagnation of progress in theoretical physics:
[insert joke about how publishing fresh JVN tokens will accelerate AGI timelines]
which one is your favorite?