John von Neumann on Computers and the Brain

Abstract

The book “The Computer and the Brain” was published more than a year after von Neumann’s death. It is hardly more than an introduction to a monograph on a subject which preoccupied him during the last years of his life. It has been prepared from an incomplete manuscript of the Silliman Lectures which he was to give at Yale University in 1956. As Mrs. von Neumann explains in the introduction, the lectures were written during his fatal illness. In places the presentation of the material lacks his characteristic style. Nevertheless the book, like everything von Neumann wrote, remains highly original and intensely stimulating.