James Miller interviews Greg Cochran on a variety of topics. Some comments on the early part of the interview (you might need to listen to it to make sense of what I write below): 1. The prediction I’ve made about the consequences of additive genetic variance in intelligence is not that we’ll be able to …
George Dyson is Freeman’s son. I believe this talk was given at SciFoo or Foo Camp. More Ulam (neither he nor von Neumann were really logicians, at least not primarily). Wikipedia on Monte Carlo Methods. I first learned these in Caltech’s Physics 129: Mathematical Methods, which used the textbook by Mathews and Walker. This book was …
The original title of this post was For this you won a Nobel (Memorial) Prize? But see sad news at bottom. A Beautiful Mind: Nash went to see von Neumann a few days after he passed his generals? He wanted, he had told the secretary cockily, to discuss an idea that might be of interest …
The picture above is of von Neumann, Feynman, and Ulam. More Ulam. See also the nature of intuition and intuition and the two brains. Adventures of a Mathematician: (p.147-148) … the main ability to have was a visual, and also an almost tactile, way to imagine the physical situations, rather than a merely logical picture …