# Talk:John von Neumann


### John von Neumann
" Unable to accept his impending death,[82] Von Neumann was given last rites by Father Strittmatter before dying." This falsely implies a cause and effect relationship between his inability to accept death and his decision to receive last rites. He converted to Catholicism earlier, and so the last rites would be given regardless of his view of death.77Mike77 (talk) 15:19, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

"Later, von Neumann suggested a new method of linear programming, using the homogeneous linear system of Paul Gordan (1873), which was later popularized by Karmarkar's algorithm. Von Neumann's method used a pivoting algorithm between simplices, with the pivoting decision determined by a nonnegative least squares subproblem with a convexity constraint (projecting the zero-vector onto the convex hull of the active simplex). Von Neumann's algorithm was the first interior point method of linear programming"
It's stuff like this that reminds me that I don't know why I bother reading these articles.
80.71.142.35 (talk) 17:46, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

How fortunate that no one forces you to do so. Favonian (talk) 18:20, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
If you can come up with an accurate summary which is more accessible that would be a welcome improvement. But notice from the previous paragraph that "von Neumann provided an hourlong lecture" about related topics to explain something to another expert. It's going to be tough to duplicate that, plus prerequisites back to some arbitrary point, in the space of a paragraph or two. Readers who don't know what linear programming is (and related other jargon terms used here) should probably just skim past this paragraph, taking away a message like «Von Neumann made some advances in optimization algorithms using his cutting-edge understanding of linear algebra»; but notice this version is vague to the point of meaningless; the more detailed version gives some idea to people who do know about these topics what Von Neumann's specific contributions were about. A curious reader such as yourself can click through a wikilink to linear programming or Karmarkar's algorithm to try to make more sense of it, if you want to. –jacobolus (t) 19:35, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

The article says "he would send a preprint of his article containing both results, which never appeared".  Does that mean that they never appeared in a printed publication?  Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 05:01, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

In John von Neumann § University studies, the last sentence says "Von Neumann was enrolled in chemical engineering at the University of Budapest while studying mathematics in Berlin", but previous sentences say otherwise. As a reader, I would think that the article should either give some indication of which claim is more likely to be true based on the evidence in each source, or else accept one claim as true and delete the other or relegate it to a footnote about mistaken scholarship. Biogeographist (talk) 22:37, 3 October 2024 (UTC)