57 Quotes by John von Neumann

With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.

Problems are often stated in vague terms... because it is quite uncertain what the problems really are.

You don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in.

I would like to make a confession which may seem immoral: I do not believe in Hilbert space anymore.

I am thinking about something much more important than bombs. I am thinking about computers.

Technological possibilities are irresistible to man. If man can go to the moon, he will. If he can control the climate, he will.

By and large it is uniformly true that in mathematics there is a time lapse between a mathematical discovery and the moment it becomes useful; and that this lapse can be anything from 30 to 100 years, in some cases even more; and that the whole system seems to function without any direction, without any reference to usefulness, and without any desire to do things which are useful.

The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work-that is, correctly to describe phenomena from a reasonably wide area.

The calculus was the first achievement of modern mathematics and it is difficult to overestimate its importance. I think it defines more unequivocally than anything else the inception of modern mathematics; and the system of mathematical analysis, which is its logical development, still constitutes the greatest technical advance in exact thinking.