Privatdozent

Privatdozent

Home
Essays
Audio
Recommendations
Support
Archive
About

Princeton

Turing's Work on the Riemann Hypothesis
Alan Turing (1912-54) is a well-known name for a variety of reasons.
 • 
Jørgen Veisdal
1
Nash's Invention of Non-Cooperative Game Theory (1949-50)
"The entire edifice of game theory rests on two theorems: von Neumann’s min-max theorem of 1928 and Nash’s equilibrium theorem of 1950" - Nasar (1998)
 • 
Jørgen Veisdal
The Entscheidungsproblem (1930s)
In the early 1930s, the provincial town of Princeton, New Jersey was already well on its way to becoming a hotbed for mathematical exploration.
 • 
Jørgen Veisdal
John von Neumann's 1935 letter to Oswald Veblen
The book John von Neumann: Selected Letters* by Miklós Rédei (2005) is a fascinating collection of 150 of John von Neumann (1903-57)’s correspondences…
 • 
Jørgen Veisdal
The Birth of AI (1956)
The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was an academic workshop sometimes considered to be the founding moment for artificial…
 • 
Jørgen Veisdal
4
The Birth of the Institute for Advanced Study (1930)
"A first-rate research institution with no teachers, no students, no classes, only researchers protected from the vicissitudes and pressures of the…
 • 
Jørgen Veisdal
4
The Beautiful Life of John Forbes Nash, Jr.
Mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr (1928-2015). was born in Bluefield, West Virginia in 1928. He died in a car crash in New Jersey on the 23rd of May…
 • 
Jørgen Veisdal
The Legend of Abraham Wald
Historians of science sometimes lament the fact certain historical figures are famous for the wrong reasons.
 • 
Jørgen Veisdal
Nash's Bargaining Problem (1950)
Just before John Nash made his breakthrough discovery of the Nash equilibrium, he wrote his first paper on another problem later to be known as Nash’s…
 • 
Jørgen Veisdal
John F. Nash Jr.'s Game of "Hex" (1949)
“Oh, by the way, what was it that they were playing?” asked von Neumann. “Nash,” answered Tucker, allowing the corners of his mouth to turn up ever so…
 • 
Jørgen Veisdal
1
The Eccentricities of J. Robert Oppenheimer
As a child he collected rocks, wrote poetry and studied French literature. Never weighing more than 130 pounds, throughout his life he was a “tall and…
 • 
Jørgen Veisdal
2
The Duties of John von Neumann’s Assistant in the 1930s
"The job entailed such onerous duties that only someone with an iron constitution could survive. My constitution, it so happened, was not made by iron…
 • 
Jørgen Veisdal
Oppenheimer’s Letter of Recommendation for Richard Feynman (1943)
Let’s journey back to November 1943. The Manhattan project is in its fourth year of operations, and J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Los Alamos Laboratory is…
 • 
Jørgen Veisdal
Alan Turing in America
“Beyond the way they speak, there is only one (no two!) features of American life which I find really tiresome. The impossibility of getting a bath in…
 • 
Jørgen Veisdal
Richard Feynman’s First Lecture (1940)
“I went through fire on my first.”
 • 
Jørgen Veisdal
© 2025 Privatdozent
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start writingGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture