Steve Hsu, who started off this discussion, had some comments on my speculations on the personality of John von Neumann and others. Steve writes:
I [Hsu] actually knew Feynman a bit when I was an undergrad, and found him to be very nice to students. Since then I have heard quite a few stories from people in theoretical physics which emphasize his nastier side, and I think in the end he was quite a complicated person like everyone else.
There are a couple of pseudo-biographies of vN, but none as high quality as, e.g., Gleick’s book on Feynman or Hodges book about Turing. (Gleick studied physics as an undergrad at Harvard, and Hodges is a PhD in mathematical physics — pretty rare backgrounds for biographers!) For example, as mentioned on the comment thread to your post, Steve Heims wrote a book about both vN and Wiener (!), and Norman Macrae wrote a biography of vN. Both books are worth reading, but I think neither really do him justice. The breadth of vN’s work is just too much for any one person to absorb, ranging from pure math to foundations of QM, to shock wave theory (important for nuclear weapons), to game theory, to computation.
I read the biography of Gell-Mann that came out several years ago, and it made me feel sad for the guy. In particular, I’m thinking about the bit where, after Feynman hit the bestseller list, Gell-Mann got a big book contract himself, but then he got completely blocked and couldn’t figure out what to put in the book (which eventually became the unreadable but respectfully-reviewed The Quark and the Jaguar).
I’m still interested in the von Neumann paradox, but given what’s been written in the comment thread so far, I’m at this point doubting that it will ever be resolved to my satisfaction. If only I could bring Stanislaw Ulam back to life and ask him a few questions, I’m sure he could explain. Ulam definitely seems like my kind of guy.
Biologists: James D. Watson and Edward O. Wilson.
They hated each other at Harvard in the 1960s, and have since reconciled.
Watson seems widely disliked and Wilson liked. On the other hand, I suspect that deep down Wilson has a huge ego, which leads him to choose to behave in a likable manner so that he will get positive feedback. I'm a big fan of enlightened self-interest, so Wilson is a hero of mine as an all-around good guy. But, I still wonder about that ego of his.
Watson strikes me as somebody with slightly less ego than Wilson (for example, he quit research around the age of 40 on the grounds that he was over the hill mentally, and went into research management), which leads him to behave in an often rude, abrasive manner. He seems to want to get a lot done and realizes he doesn't have the natural capacity for getting it done in a fashion that offends the fewest people. The funny thing is that Watson sure has gotten a lot done despite offending a lot of people.
Steve:
Interesting. I have a huge ego myself. But I wouldn't say that I behave in a likable manner on the blog (real life is another story; lots of people dislike me in the real world) as some sort of strategic move. Rather, I'm aware of the high level of difficulty of the problems I work on–that is, I get stuck on them, and I have a big ego, therefore I think these are genuinely hard problems–hence, I have a lot of humility when writing about these things.
Someone with a lesser ego might well behave with more overconfidence. For example, Steven Levitt is, by all accounts, a genuinely nice guy and also very humble. But this very humility allows him to think that geniuses such as Gary Becker, Casey Mulligan, that Microsoft guy, etc., have solved all sorts of problems that seem to the rest of us to be so difficult.
Here's a thought. Perhaps, if your goal is to be a organizer or promoter or administrator of research, it's best to be very smart but to feel like you're surrounded by smarter people, following the model of Oppenheimer, Watson, and Levitt. If your ego is stratospheric, you have to figure out a different way of contributing, whether in isolation (Einstein, Wilson) or through multiple interlocking collaborations (Neumann).
It's been a little while since I read it, but I don't recall "The Quark and the Jaguar" being all that unreadable. I have perennial problems grokking the nuclear forces, and I found it helpful on that. Or at least I think my understanding was helped.
Gell-Mann's book is the opposite of unreadable. Juicy and provocative, he lays waste to anyone that gets in his way. That's what makes it readable.
On the topic of math biographies. The best I have read is:
"The Matematician Sophus Lie: It was the audacity of my thinking" by Arild Stubhaug. Nice view of another time (Sophus Lie died in 1898). Had he lived today, he could have been an olympic champion: Once he walked 160 km in one day, from Oslo to his father's house, to get a book, and then back to Oslo. His father was not at home, and he did'nt bother to waite … When in Europe, he travelled by foot— from Berlin to Paris, from Paris to northern Italy. Under that walk, a war broke out, and he was arrested under the suspicion of being a spy. ¿Why — he had notebooks with ununderstandable signs!, which surely was some code … He asked the (french) oficer what they did with the prisoners. The answer was: usually they are shot at sunrise. Other times!