John von Neumann made so many fundamental contributions that Paul Halmos remarked that it was almost like von Neumann maintained a list of various subjects that he wanted to touch and develop and he systematically kept ticking items off. This sounds to be remarkably true if one just has a glance at the dizzyingly long “known for” column below his photograph on his wikipedia entry.
John von Neumann with one of his computers.
Since Neumann died (young) in 1957, rather unfortunately, there aren’t very many audio/video recordings of his (if I am correct just one 2 minute video recording exists in the public domain so far).
I recently came across a fantastic film on him that I would very highly recommend. Although it is old and the audio quality is not the best, it is certainly worth spending an hour on. The fact that this film features Eugene Wigner, Stanislaw Ulam, Oskar Morgenstern, Paul Halmos (whose little presentation I really enjoyed), Herman Goldstein, Hans Bethe and Edward Teller (who I heard for the first time, spoke quite interestingly) alone makes it worthwhile.
[Update: The videos seem to have gone off youtube. You can find Part 1 on Vimeo here and Part 2 here]
Find Part 2 here.
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Thanks so much for these links! I had scoured the Web for von Neumann videos earlier, but the only thing I had found was the clip (also included in this one) of him talking to a bunch of school kids. Pity there isn’t more publicly available.
You are most welcome. Indeed, I too was looking for quite a while. This documentary is a treasure!