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One of the five Hungarian scientific geniuses dubbed "the Martians" by their colleagues, John von Neumann is often hailed as the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century and even as the greatest scientist after Einstein. He was a key figure in the Manhattan Project; the inventor of game theory; the pioneer developer of the modern stored-program electronic computer; and an adviser to the top echelons of the American military establishment. In The Martian's Daughter, Marina von Neumann Whitman reveals intimate details about the famed scientist and explores how the cosmopolitan environment in which she was immersed, the demanding expectations of her parents, and her own struggles to emerge from the shadow of a larger-than-life parent shaped her life and work.
Unfortunately, von Neumann did not live to see his daughter rise to become the first or highest-ranking woman in a variety of arenas. Whitman became a noted academic during the 1960s and '70s, casting her teaching and writing in the framework of globalization before the word had been invented; became the first woman ever to serve on the President's Council of Economic Advisers and participated actively in U.S. efforts to reshape the international monetary and financial system during the early 1970s; pioneered the role of women on the boards of leading multinational corporations; and became the highest-ranking female executive in the American auto industry in the 1980s. In her memoir, Whitman quotes from personal letters from her father and describes her interactions with such figures as Roger Smith of GM and President Nixon. She also details the difficulties she encountered as an early entrant into a world dominated by men and how she overcame the obstacles to, in her words, "have it all."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472028559 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 08/31/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 308 |
| Sales rank: | 949,630 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Marina von Neumann Whitman is Professor of Business Administration and Public Policy at the University of Michigan.
Read an Excerpt
The Martian's Daughter
A Memoir
By Marina von Neumann Whitman
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2012 the University of MichiganAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11842-7
CHAPTER 1
The Golden Couple
My parents first met as small children. According to family lore, Mariette Kövesi rode into Johnny (in Hungarian, Jancsi) Neumann's life on a tricycle at the age of two and a half, as a guest at the fourth birthday party of one of his younger brothers. Unfortunately, there is no record of my father's reaction; he was just eight years old. The Neumann and Kövesi families (the hereditary nobility bestowed by the Austro-Hungarian emperor on my banker grandfather, Max Neumann, which allowed my father to add von to his surname, came later, in 1913) were friends and summertime neighbors, both members of the Jewish but highly assimilated Hungarian haute bourgeoisie, which flourished in Budapest in the years preceding World War I. These families, and others like them, were at the heart of the brief, shining moment when Budapest was not only co-capital, with Vienna, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but also vied with its sister city for the title of intellectual capital of Europe.
Both my parents spent their childhoods in the privileged, warmly protected environment of highly educated, professionally successful, affluent, and close-knit families. Both families lived during most of the year in large, elegant apartments in the heart of the Pest — or more commercial — side of Budapest. The apartment my father grew up in occupied one floor of a building purchased by his grandfather, who used the first floor for his agricultural implements business and installed each of his daughters, their husbands, and their children on one of the floors above. And both families spent summers in elegant "country" homes in the Buda hills overlooking the flat Pest area. The distance between the summer and winter residences was less than five miles, but each family made an annual hegira between them, with maids covering the city furniture with dustcloths and packing huge trunks and wardrobes for the trip.
My father's upbringing was singular, though, because his extraordinary precocity was recognized very early and his education was tailored to make sure that it was fully developed. His instruction at one of Budapest's three best-regarded secondary schools, the Lutheran Gymnasium, which also produced the Nobel Prize — winning physicist Eugene Wigner, was supplemented, beginning at age eleven, by private tutoring from prominent mathematicians at Budapest University. His first published paper was written jointly with one of those tutors when Johnny was seventeen. The paper, on a very abstruse theorem in geometry, already reflected a key characteristic of all his contributions to pure mathematics: his ability "to transform problems in all areas of mathematics into problems of [pure] logic."
But my father's intellectual appetite was by no means narrowly confined to mathematics, and his passion for learning lasted all his life. He was multilingual at an early age; and until his final days, he could quote from memory Goethe in German, Voltaire in French, and Thucydides in Greek. His knowledge of Byzantine history, acquired entirely through recreational reading, equaled that of many academic specialists. My mother used to say, only half jokingly, that one of the reasons she divorced him was his penchant for spending hours reading one of the tomes of an enormous German encyclopedia in the bathroom. Because his banker father felt that he needed to bolster his study of mathematics with more practical training, Johnny completed a degree in chemical engineering at the Eidgennossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, at the same time that he received a PhD in mathematics from the University of Budapest, both at age twenty-two.
While my father was growing up in a family environment that involved structured discussions of philosophy, politics, banking, science, literature, music, and just about any subject on earth around the family dinner table — discussions in which Johnny and his two younger brothers, Michael and Nicholas, were encouraged to participate — my mother, Mariette Kövesi, was experiencing a very different sort of childhood. She was an only child, six years Johnny's junior (he was born in 1903, she in 1909). Her father was a highly regarded internist and professor of medicine at the University of Budapest, also with a wide range of intellectual interests, centered on music. But he was extremely busy, rather domineering, and reputed to be a chronic womanizer. He was also, for a considerable period of his adult life, addicted to drugs he first took for relief of postoperative pain; as a physician, he had easy access to supplies. My grandmother's response to boredom and neglect was to become a first-class hypochondriac; her immediate reaction to any family conflict was to take to her bed.
However difficult her parents' relationship with each other was during Mariette's girlhood, there was one matter on which they were in complete agreement: the importance of building a protective wall around their beloved, headstrong only child. She was not allowed to go to school until she reached high school age. Her father's fear of childhood infectious diseases, stemming from his experience as a physician in the days before vaccines or antibiotics, had been exacerbated by a near fatal bout of diphtheria Mariette had suffered as a small child. But Géza Kövesi also believed that classroom schooling would not allow enough time for other pursuits he regarded as important: languages, music, and above all sports. And Mariette did indeed become a first-class tennis player in her teens and, she proudly reminded her children, the first woman in Hungary to earn a diploma in dressage from the famed Spanish Riding School in Vienna, home of the Lipizzaner horses.
Mariette's academic isolation was by no means lonely or deprived of fun. She was at the center of a tightly knit group that included four other girls her own age from her parents' social circle. The bonds of friendship formed among the five members of this self-styled "cooking club" endured until their deaths, sundered by neither the Atlantic Ocean nor the Iron Curtain, which separated the ones who lived much of their adult lives in the United States from those who remained in Hungary. And they clearly had very good times together. As old women, they frequently regaled their relatives and one another with tales of the mischievous tricks they had played on their siblings and each other.
When she was in her teens, though, Mariette was moved to frustration and rebellion by the constraints her parents imposed on her social life. Even after she had entered Budapest University, majoring in economics, her parents insisted that she be driven to parties by the family chauffeur and that he wait for her to make sure she arrived home safely at the appointed time. Once, when she got home after curfew, her father met her at the head of the stairs with a sharp slap in the face, never mind that she was twenty years old and already engaged to be married.
This extreme protectiveness was all the more irksome because Mariette was very popular, a belle in her social circle. She was what the French call a jolie laide, actually quite homely when analyzed feature by feature but so witty, vivacious, and fashionable that the overall impression was that of a beauty. As her youthful charm matured into elegance, she retained this quality until the end of her days.
The privileged, family-centered lives enjoyed by both the Neumann and the Kövesi clans during Johnny and Mariette's childhood and youth were played out against the background of continuous turmoil in Central Europe. The upheavals began with Hungary's participation on the losing side of World War I, starting when Johnny was ten and Mariette four. There followed, in quick succession, the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the 133 days of "Red Terror" brought on by Béla Kun's coup and declaration of the Soviet Hungarian Republic, and the successful countercoup of Vice Admiral Miklos Horthy, the last commander in chief of the Austro-Hungarian Navy.
Horthy's regime brought a degree of stability to the chaos-wracked nation, but a rising trend of nationalism and anti-Semitism was exacerbated by the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, under which Hungary lost some two-thirds of its territory to its neighbors Austria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Of particular importance to the parents of sixteen-year-old Johnny was the passage of the so-called Numerus Clausus, sharply restricting the access of ethnic Jews to higher education. Over the two decades that followed, Hungary engaged in a variety of arrangements and alliances aimed at regaining its lost territories, the ultimate effect of which was to push the nation increasingly in the direction of the Nazi-Fascist alliance.
The two families were outwardly relatively unaffected by the conflict that engulfed much of the world in 1914–18. The boys were too young for military service, and both families were able to maintain the accustomed patterns of their lives. Only when the communist coup of 1919 actually threatened the lives of well-to-do bourgeois families did the two households decide to flee the country. The von Neumanns sat out the 133 days of the Red Terror at a vacation home on the Adriatic coast, near Venice. They returned to Budapest to find their apartment and belongings unscathed as soon as the takeover ended.
Once back in Budapest, the families were clearly troubled by the growing anti-Semitism in their homeland; the Neumanns' pragmatic response was to send Johnny to the less restrictive environment of the German Weimar Republic for further education, even though anti-Semitism was also taking root there. The ultimate fate of Jews in both Hungary and Germany once Hitler had taken control was beyond their wildest imaginings, as it was for the millions of European Jews who paid with their lives for their inability to foresee the future in time to escape it.
Underneath the apparently unruffled exterior of their everyday lives, both Johnny's and Mariette's views of the world were strongly shaped by these years of turmoil. My father traced the origins of his hawkishness regarding the Soviet Union (he openly favored a preventive attack on that country immediately following World War II, when we had the atomic bomb and it didn't) to the traumatic impact of the 1919 communist coup. In hearings on his nomination to the Atomic Energy Commission in 1955, he was unequivocal: "My opinions have been violently opposed to Marxism ever since I remember, and quite in particular since I had about a three months taste of it in Hungary in 1919." Both my parents retained throughout their lives a cynicism, a be-ready-for-the worst attitude toward world events, that contrasted sharply with my optimistic American worldview.
This difference was brought home to me in the summer of 1974 when, as the Nixon impeachment proceedings were under way, I was about to set off on a monthlong vacation in Europe with my husband and children. My mother was aghast that we would leave home at a time so fraught with uncertainty. My response was that, while I had no idea who would be president by the time I returned, I felt confident that my credit cards would continue to be accepted in Europe and that we would be greeted by the same grumpy but benign customs officials when we returned. It took the catastrophe of 9/11 to shake the American sense of security that separated my weltanschauung from that of my parents.
The relationship between my parents blossomed from childhood friendship into romance during the summers of 1927–29, when my father came home to Budapest on summer holidays from his position as a privatdozent(assistant professor) at the University of Berlin. Things accelerated rapidly from an unannounced engagement to marriage when my father was invited to spend a term lecturing at Princeton University from February to May of 1930 and wanted to take my mother with him as his wife.
By the time of their elaborate wedding on New Year's Day, 1930, Johnny had acquired international fame in mathematical circles on the basis of the thirty-two major papers he had published, at a rate approaching one a month. Some of these papers were major contributions in different areas of pure mathematics, including logic and set theory. Others laid the foundation for his mathematical formalization of the new physics — the probabilistic approach of quantum mechanics that was replacing the determinism of classical Newtonian physics in explaining the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles. This latter work culminated in the publication in 1932 of his book The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, which is today still in print and regarded as a significant advance in modern physics.
Von Neumann's name is not always associated with the origins of quantum mechanics, but he is universally recognized as the father of game theory. A paper he published in 1928 set forth a proof of the minimax theorem, the basis of that theory, which he later developed in the pathbreaking Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, coauthored with economist Oskar Morgenstern. The crux of this proof was to show that, in any precisely defined conflict (which he called a "game") between two individuals where one's win is equal to the other's loss, there is a strategy that guarantees the smallest maximum loss or largest minimum gain for each player, regardless of what his opponent does.
While Johnny was building his brilliant academic career through an astonishing outpouring of significant contributions in a variety of fields, Mariette was a bright but not particularly serious student of economics at the University of Budapest, a pursuit she unhesitatingly abandoned in favor of marrying Johnny and venturing off with him into the New World. I can't help wondering if, along with her genuine affection for this brilliant, handsome young man whom she had known all her life, she wasn't motivated in part by the prospect of putting an ocean between herself and her overprotective parents. Johnny and Mariette were, in any case, a golden couple — both of them intelligent and witty, charming and gregarious, elegant and fun loving, and affluent enough to indulge their taste for luxury.
Mariette's family had demanded that Johnny convert to Catholicism before the wedding, as they themselves had done some years earlier, and he readily complied. Such conversions were common among the assimilated Jewish haute bourgeoisie of Budapest during the years of the anti-Semitic Horthy regime. For many in this group, whose ties to their ancestral religion ranged between loose and nonexistent, this attempt to cling to their assimilated status was a natural one, even though it was doomed to failure; the regime's definition of Jewish was clearly ethnic rather than religious.
These efforts to repudiate or conceal Jewish origins — echoing the response of the converted Jews to the vicious anti-Semitism of fifteenth-century Spain — followed my parents, and many other Central Europeans as well, to the United States. My father was entirely pragmatic about the matter; no one as well known as he was could hope to conceal his origins. In addition, many of his friends and colleagues were secular Jewish intellectuals like himself, their attachment to their ancestral roots consisting mainly of a large store of Jewish jokes, sometimes directed at the goyim (non-Jews) and sometimes at themselves. One of my father's best-known lines was, "It takes a Hungarian to go into a revolving door behind you and come out first." One of his friends recalled that they used to amuse themselves in boring lectures by holding up a finger for the other to see every time the speaker said something that labeled him a nebbish, a Yiddish term of condescension.
My mother's attitude was quite different, and she brought it with her across the ocean. Throughout my childhood and, even more, my adolescence, she impressed on me constantly the importance of concealing my Jewish ancestry, convincing me that it was some sort of shameful secret. The threat she felt was not to her life or her legal rights, but rather to her social acceptability, her fear of being regarded as an outsider. At a time when many clubs and other social organizations banned Jews, and private schools and Ivy League universities had unacknowledged but widely recognized quotas, this was not an idle concern. She bonded with America almost from the instant she set foot on its soil, and in her mind being 100 percent American did not include minority status.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Martian's Daughter by Marina von Neumann Whitman. Copyright © 2012 the University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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