TEHRAN – A Persian translation of the Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann’s 1958 book “The Computer and the Brain” has come to Iranian bookstores.

Rendered into Persian by Reza Amirrahimi, the book has been published by Now Publications.

In this classic work, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century explores the analogies between computing machines and the living human brain. 

Von Neumann, whose many contributions to science, mathematics, and engineering include the basic organizational framework at the heart of today’s computers, concludes that the brain operates both digitally and analogically, but also has its own peculiar statistical language.

In his foreword to this new edition, Ray Kurzweil, a futurist famous in part for his own reflections on the relationship between technology and intelligence, places von Neumann’s work in a historical context and shows how it remains relevant today.

Von Neumann was a mathematician who made major contributions to a vast range of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, continuous geometry, economics and game theory, and computer science.

He is generally regarded as one of the foremost mathematicians of the 20th century. 

Most notably, von Neumann was a pioneer in the application of operator theory to quantum mechanics, a principal member of the Manhattan Project and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a key figure in the development of game theory and the concepts of cellular automata and the universal constructor. 

Along with Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, von Neumann worked out key steps in the nuclear physics involved in thermonuclear reactions and the hydrogen bomb.

Photo: Front cover of the Persian translation of John von Neumann’s book “The Computer and the Brain”.

MMS/YAW