The Early Years of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern

There was a time when scholars were generalists. The great philosophers of ancient Greece were lawyers, theologians, playwrights, political scientists, and naturalists. For instance, Archimedes (287–212 BC) was a mathematician and engineer, physicist, astronomer, and statesman. In the early Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) made significant contributions in art, architecture, music, technology, mathematics, anatomy, geology, botany, physics, and invention. Isaac Newton (1643–1727) was a physicist, astronomer, mathematician, theologian, and philosopher, while Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) was a technologist, physicist, mathematician, philosopher, and astronomer. As late as the nineteenth century, the mathematician and statistician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) was also an astronomer, physicist and geophysicist, theologian, and expert at optics.