Young Von Neumann Encounters Punched Cards

[beamjockey]

In addition to his work on pure mathematics, John von Neumann contributed fundamental advances to dozens of fields, from quantum mechanics to weather prediction. In particular, he was a pivotal figure in the development of electronic digital computers.

I've been reading George Dyson's terrific book Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital

Comments

[neowolf2]

I wonder how early anyone theorized about cells having a Jacquard-like programmable mechanism for making proteins. I think the idea that proteins have specific structures was actually fairly late (even though it should have been obvious after the first protein was crystallized.)

[mmcirvin]

Erwin Schrodinger wrote a book in 1944 that had the basic idea, but I wouldn't be surprised if you could go earlier.

[mmcirvin]

...according to Wikipedia, H. J. Muller had most of the theory in 1922.

[neowolf2]

Yeah, I had looked up the wikipedia page on "What Is Life?" before I made that earlier post, but it didn't say anything about whether Schoedinger had that idea. He had the idea that genetic information was stored in molecular structures ("aperiodic crystals", had he not heard of polymers?), but I don't know if he took the next step.

[mmcirvin]

...the Avery-MacLeod-McCarty experiment in 1944 identified DNA as the carrier of genetic information in bacteria... but I don't know if anyone had an inkling of just how that information was expressed in the phenotype:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avery-MacLeod-McCarty_experiment

[mmcirvin]

Von Neumann's work on self-replicators in cellular automata was sometime in the late 1940s, though I think much of it wasn't published until the Sixties