Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, John von Neumann!

On 27/12/2017, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote (in part): This does not answer the potential Babbage connection but I ran across the following paragraph by Dyson ("A Walk through Johnny von Neumann's Garden" from here http://www.ams.org/notices/201302/index.html) "I got to know Johnny personally when I came to the Institute for Advanced Study in 1948. He was then actively engaged in building the institute computer and learning how to use it. He under- stood from the beginning that two of the most important uses of the machine would be to predict weather and to model climate. He hired engineers to build the machine and meteorologists to use it. The chief engineer was Julian Bigelow, and the chief meteorologist was Jules Charney. Each of them had a gang of young people to do the heavy work, persuading a totally new kind of machine to produce some real science. I enjoyed very much the young people, with their rowdy conversation and irreverent behavior. There was an amusing clash of cultures between these young hooligans and the older members of the institute. As Einstein wrote to his friend the queen of the Belgians when he arrived at the institute in 1933, Princeton was a quaint and ceremonious village populated by demi- gods on stilts. The culture of the older members was based on formal politeness and respect for the academic hierarchy. Johnny and I were on the side of the hooligans." N.