[[ Recently I was surfing Wikipedia and stumbled across the John von Neumann page. My family is long friends with Marina Whitman, von Neumann's daughter, so I forwarded her father's page to her (as well as her own page) in case there were any corrections needed. She enthusiastically said that there were and sent me a number of notes. In making the changes, I wanted to document the source so I created this page as a record both of the relevant parts of her email to me about the corrections as well as our telephone conversations about them. Gray Watson -- January 30, 2011 ]]
Under "Politics and social affairs", the wikipedia page stated: "He enjoyed associating with persons in positions of power, and this led him into government service." which was from (supposedly) a documentary from the Mathematical Association of American. Dr. Whitman states in correction:
The reason my father entered government service (starting with Los Alamos) was primarily because he felt that, if freedom and civilization were to survive, it would have to be because the U.S. would triumph over totalitarianism from the right (Naziism and Fascism) and totalitarianism from the left (Soviet Communism). Anything else was strictly secondary.
In the Personality section of the document, it states: "he was even known to play tennis wearing his business suit". This was very amusing to Dr. Whitman:
My father never played tennis in his life, but he did ride down Grand Canyon astride a mule in a three-piece pin-stripe suit.
One controversial statement in the wikipedia document, which has engendered endless battles, lawsuits (Honeywell/Sperry/Rand), etc., is the my father's paper on the EDVAC. I think a fairer statement would be: the von Neumann architecture (of the stored program computer) was based partly on the work of Eckart and Mauchly.
Free Spam Protection Android ORM Simple Java Magic JMX using HTTP Great Eggnog Recipe Massachusetts Covid Vaccine Sites