Two Geniuses

About fifteen years ago, I had the opportunity to work with one of the smartest men that I have ever met in my lifetime.  His name was Herb Sullivan and he was an erratic genius with an encyclopedic mind.  His father, a high powered Washington lawyer, was a co-author of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1933 that actually remains controversial to this day concerning its role in the Great Depression.  Herb's mother was Jewish and it was with her that he identified the most as a cultural but not religious Jew.  He was a boy genius and graduated from  University of California, Los Angeles with a degree in physics when he was 19 y/o.  He spent the war working in naval intelligence (and the Manhattan Project)  and after the war years he worked as a researcher at Columbia University working on various technologies including radar and computer technology.  We met when I worked with him as a consultant in his parallel processing company in San Diego, CA.  He gave me a quick tutorial - not really quick but a series of wine filled lunches - where we discussed religion, politics, philosophy and technology.  He knew as much about Catholicism as I did and we had fabulous times discussing the Old and New Testaments. In our conversations he had a very good intellectual understanding of Christ  as Messiah but he was not a believer.  He was a sad person, childless and divorced, who for all his brilliance was a bit unfocused due to his personal life and unfulfilled genius.  He died a few short years later of cancer.  He was of the few people that I have met who was really a very good and kind person  - a noble pagan in the best sense of the word.  His hero was Johnny von Neumann.

John von Neumann was one of the most brilliant men of the 20th century.  In reading his biography, one can understand why a young Herb Sullivan admired him so much.  Born in Hungary, John was a mathematician and an early pioneer in computer development.  On the dark side, he was one of the main people involved in nuclear physics and the invention of thermonuclear weapons.  You can read his biography here.  I don't know if Herb and Johnny, as Herb called him, ever met but I think so during the war but my memory is a bit hazy at the this point......I usually had to have a few drinks with Herb after the work when he really opened up about his life.

So here is one of the most brilliant men of the past century.....or any century.....who finds himself with an incurable disease and he is dying.  Here is a 'secular account':

 Eugene Wigner wrote of von Neumann's death [18]:-

When von Neumann realised he was incurably ill, his logic forced him to realise that he would cease to exist, and hence cease to have thoughts ... It was heartbreaking to watch the frustration of his mind, when all hope was gone, in its struggle with the fate which appeared to him unavoidable but unacceptable.

In [5] von Neumann's death is described in these terms:-

... his mind, the amulet on which he had always been able to rely, was becoming less dependable. Then came complete psychological breakdown; panic, screams of uncontrollable terror every night. His friend Edward Teller said, "I think that von Neumann suffered more when his mind would no longer function, than I have ever seen any human being suffer."

Von Neumann's sense of invulnerability, or simply the desire to live, was struggling with unalterable facts. He seemed to have a great fear of death until the last... No achievements and no amount of influence could save him now, as they always had in the past. Johnny von Neumann, who knew how to live so fully, did not know how to die.

In reality this is not the end of the story although to the agnostic scientific community it has a certain drama and truth and is nihilistic in tone.  Here is the rest of the story......

I found the following in another biography of the great man.


Von Neumann was diagnosed with bone cancer or pancreatic cancer in 1957, possibly caused by exposure to radioactivity while observing A-bomb tests in the Pacific or in later work on nuclear weapons at Los Alamos, New Mexico. (Fellow nuclear pioneer Enrico Fermi had died of stomach cancer in 1954.) Von Neumann died within a few months of the initial diagnosis, in excruciating pain. The cancer had spread to his brain, inhibiting mental ability. When at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., he invited Roman Catholic priest (Father Anselm Strittmatter), who administered him the last Sacraments.^[8] He died under military security lest he reveal military secrets while heavily medicated. John von Neumann was buried at Princeton Cemetery in Princeton, Mercer County, New Jersey.

He wrote 150 published papers in his life; 60 in pure mathematics, 20 in physics, and 60 in applied mathematics. He was developing a theory of the structure of the human brain before he died.

Hopefully Herb and Johnny are conversing in heaven where the two geniuses are eternally contemplating and analyzing the works and designs of the Divine Genius.      

Requiescant in Pace.