Editors’ Notes

Abstract

The documents selected for publication in this book have never been published before. All are deposited in the von Neumann Archive of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C., USA). The rich von Neumann Archive contains numerous documents that have never been published in any form. The documents included in this volume have been selected on the basis of their direct relevance to von Neumann’s work on the foundations of quantum physics, the main topic of this volume. Three kinds of documents are published here: (i) letters by and to von Neumann, (ii) von Neumann’s 1954 address to the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam, and (iii) the unpublished manuscript “Quantum mechanics of infinite systems” authored by von Neumann. The comments below put these documents in context.