When you look at it holistically, von Neumann was more influential in science and mathematics in the 20th century than either Einstein or Planck. He wasn't as obvious a symbol of the scientific revolution, but his contributions to SO MANY THINGS at a fundamental level makes him stand out to me.
It's odd that even today, different disciplines are still silo'd. My son started a research cross-database search engine because different disciplies use different terms for nearly identical concepts. Even within medicine it's silo'd.
Trouble with that startup was, the medical folks with money don't use computer tools. And the students in training have no money.
It's crazy that we talk about LLMs, AI/ML and what not but so many fields still don't use computation as much as we think they do simply because they cannot reliably keep up with the advancements happening almost everyday and people simply forgetting about backwards compatibility in their products
A researcher submitted a paper to the medical journal _Diabetes care_ in the nineties that basically redescribed integral calculus as a novel finding. How’s that for a silo?
This is really funny. A less extreme example is how much domain-specific terminology in Reinforcement Learning and Control Theory/Model Predictive Control refer to the same underlying phenomena, but we must translate between the two. I understand there are many unique concepts as well, but it would be so helpful if the overlap here used the same terminology and notation.
I still get IEEE Trans. on Control Theory, and it's all machine learning now. Except that the controls people are desperately trying to solidify the underpinnings of machine learning, so that control systems don't suddenly misbehave for some sets of inputs. Controls people want a guarantee that if it does something reasonable for inputs of 5.1 and 5.2, it doesn't do something completely unexpected for an input of 5.15.
I always say knowledge is like a sweater. Pull a thread and the whole thing unravels. Everything is connected so if you start somewhere and never stop learning you'll end up in every discipline. There's also a good old Weezer song called Undone for this.
My minor required me to take Electricity & Magnetism from the physics department the same semester I had to take Fields & Waves from the electrical engineering department.
Yes, they were identical.
My crib note that I took into the later final exam was simply a conversion between terms in the two departments. Nothing else; I'd already crammed and aced the first exam.
Oddly enough, I got a physics degree, and then happened to teach the engineering course for one semester many years ago while in between jobs. I'm sure this varies from one college to the next. My impressions at the time were:
The physics version was much more mathematical, and did things like solving everything in spherical coordinates. It also kind of served as a preparation for solving corresponding problems in quantum mechanics.
The engineering version was more nuts-and-bolts, covering things like transformers, motors, and transmission lines. (Antennas were for a later course).
As a consequence, teaching the engineering course required me to quickly learn a whole bunch of stuff that we glossed over or ignored in the physics course. While also teaching it. Fortunately I was an experimental physicist and had also done some work in industry, so the topics weren't utterly unfamiliar.
Definitely my favorite physicist for the same reason you state. The notion that he just went around different fields and said “here’s how math can improve things,” invented some new approach, and moved on to another field to do it all over again just cracks me up.
Nowadays we'd call that "engineer's disease". I wonder how many potential Von Neumanns were discouraged from branching out into other fields by jealous gatekeepers who assume that any interest in their field by "outsiders", especially technical people, is "epistemic trespassing".
I have yet to meet a (academic) researcher that doesn't like to talk about their research topic if somebody comes and is genuinely interested. I mean most work on a topic that has maybe another 10-100 people in the world who are interested.
The problem is that instead most people to come to them are either obvious crackpots, who think they have solved cancer (energy...) and contact the person because they are a biologist, physicist ... (on a completely unrelated topic usually). Or they come from a place of arrogance, i.e. "we do ... like this, our method is clearly superior you should adopt it", or even worse here buy our clearly superior method.
An example I can think of off the top of my head is Luis Alvarez, the nobel physicist who came up with the asteroid impact theory of dinosaur extinction. The geology and paleontology community shunned him until the 90s when the Chicxulub crater was discovered (though geology is historically infamous for this, to the extent that nearly every important paradigm shift in geology was made by non-geologist outsiders who faced ridicule for their theories)
Yeah. I've been a part of a number of academic projects, and though my career has been in the private sector, my experience is that collaboration across fields and disciplines is relatively pain free (though maybe not a priority because the pathway to a pub and impact is not obvious). I think most people want to work with other interested people.
In my limited experience, the friction is between labs and groups that are working on very similar things, and the competition is direct and obvious. And even here, the source of the conflict is the reward structures of the field, not some aversion to collaboration or personal arrogance.
