He was convinced he would fade into obscurity and that his discoveries were inadequate. He believed that people would remember Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel and he would fade into obscurity.
Is this actually true? It makes sense but I can’t find a source for it.
According to the mathematician G.H. Hardy (Ramanujan’s sponsor and collaborator), Bertrand Russell had a nightmare about Principia Mathematica being lost to time...
The evidence overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that John von Neumann was indeed profoundly insecure about his intellectual legacy, despite his monumental achievements across multiple fields of science and mathematics.
The testimonies of his daughter Marina von Neumann Whitman and his close friend Stanisław Ulam provide direct, first-hand accounts of his persistent anxiety about whether his work would endure. These are not speculative interpretations but documented observations from the people who knew him best.
Rota wrote that von Neumann had “deep-seated and recurring self-doubts”.[394]John L. Kelley reminisced in 1989 that “Johnny von Neumann has said that he will be forgotten while Kurt Gödel is remembered with Pythagoras, but the rest of us viewed Johnny with awe.”[395] Ulam suggests that some of his self-doubts with regard for his own creativity may have come from the fact he had not discovered several important ideas that others had, even though he was more than capable of doing so, giving the incompleteness theorems and Birkhoff’spointwise ergodic theorem as examples. Von Neumann had a virtuosity in following complicated reasoning and had supreme insights, yet he perhaps felt he did not have the gift for seemingly irrational proofs and theorems or intuitive insights. Ulam describes how during one of his stays at Princeton while von Neumann was working on rings of operators, continuous geometries and quantum logic he felt that von Neumann was not convinced of the importance of his work, and only when finding some ingenious technical trick or new approach did he take some pleasure in it.[396] However, according to Rota, von Neumann still had an “incomparably stronger technique” compared to his friend, despite describing Ulam as the more creative mathematician.[394]
It occurs to me that you might be after a citation for Russell’s nightmare! It’s mentioned in a prominent sidebar at Wikipedia’s page on Principia Mathematica, but the original source is Hardy’s memoir, A Mathematician’s Apology, which is on the web in many places.
Is this actually true? It makes sense but I can’t find a source for it.
According to the mathematician G.H. Hardy (Ramanujan’s sponsor and collaborator), Bertrand Russell had a nightmare about Principia Mathematica being lost to time...
A report on this question produced by AI (Kimi K2 research mode):
See also the Self-doubts section of his Wikipedia page:
The 1+1=2 joke will forever lives as a meme.
The only things coming close is the 15=3*5 quantum computing paper.
I’d also like some citation for this, please.
It occurs to me that you might be after a citation for Russell’s nightmare! It’s mentioned in a prominent sidebar at Wikipedia’s page on Principia Mathematica, but the original source is Hardy’s memoir, A Mathematician’s Apology, which is on the web in many places.
Thank you!!