Klára Dán von Neumann encounters a new home, a new husband and a new project
The first modern-style code ever executed on a computer was written in the 1940s by a woman named Klára Dán von Neumann—or Klári to her family and friends. And the historic program she wrote was used to develop thermonuclear weapons. In this season, we peer into a fascinating moment in the postwar U.S. through the prism of von Neumann’s work.
That line you heard about chasing rainbows comes from a chapter in Klara Dan von Neumann’s memoir. In this, our last episode of the season, we explore that “newest incarnation” of Klari’s life: her final years in sunny California that were filled with the promise of peace and quiet. Klari was heart broken. She was also exhausted. Because on top of her grief, she had to deal with everything Johnny left behind.
KLARA VON NEUMANN: It was an overwhelming job particularly since he was very prolific, and in so many different fields. KLARA VON NEUMANN: But this is really what I want, sit at the edge of the pool and twiddle my toes -- no more drama or excitement just to be at peace with the world, my husband and myself. KATIE HAFNER: Yeah, go here, go right here. La Jolla is kind of nestled into a cove. And so the water wraps around La Jolla, if that makes sense.NORA MATHISON: Seems like it’s right off the road.
What is clear is that by 1962, 49-year-old Klari was done with computers for good. In a letter she wrote in April of that year, she asked to be removed from a computing seminar’s mailing list because…KATIE HAFNER: The coding chapter of her life had ended, but around this time, Klari started a new project. A more personal one: She began writing a memoir. And this brings us all the way back to someone we met at the very beginning of the season: Klari’s stepdaughter, Marina von Neumann Whitman.
MARINA VON NEUMANN WHITMAN: I was astounded at how well she wrote in English, which after all was her second language or fifth, or God knows what, anyway.KATIE HAFNER: Without the memoir, Klari’s life would have looked really different to us, too. In reading it, we get Klari’s life as she wanted to tell it, and we meet Klari the narrator. Someone witty and blunt and open.
GEORGE DYSON: I think if, if, if she had signed a contract for her autobiography, it would've completely changed her life. KATIE HAFNER: On November 9th, 1963, Klari and Carl had friends over. They drank a good amount and stayed up late. According to Carl, the guests left at 1:30 in the morning. Carl eventually went to bed at 3. Klari stayed up.KATIE HAFNER: Her car was found by the Windansea beach, a few blocks from her house. It seems Klari drove to the beach, then walked into the surf. KATIE HAFNER: Klari’s body was found washed up on the beach at 6:45 am on November 10, 1963. A neighbor identified the body.
KATIE HAFNER: When someone dies by suicide, it’s difficult to resist looking for an explanation. We humans want to pin the pieces of a life on a bulletin board, arranging them to show that this led to that and to that. So I turned to the scores of letters she had written and received over the years. And many of those letters were in Hungarian. There was no throwing these things into Google translate because they were handwritten, and Klari’s handwriting was as complicated as the woman herself. We needed just the right translator, one who could decipher that impenetrable Hungarian script.KATIE HAFNER: How are you, I’m good how are you.KATIE HAFNER: That’s Agi Antal.
KATIE HAFNER: Here’s Agi reading from Klari’s diary--an entry from January of 1931. Klari was nineteen. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, you can contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. GEORGE DYSON: It was this perseverance against the darkness of fate or something, I mean, she just, she just had such a spirit and obviously intelligence. GEORGE DYSON: Klari’s role, so, she was sort of there, at the moment of creation. If you look at this as a sort of cradle in a manger sort of thing, she, she was holding the cradle.
KATIE HAFNER: Today, computing is oriented around the male individual, the disruptor, a new iteration of the “great man theory of history” we see so often. It’s easy to forget it hasn’t always been that way. KATIE HAFNER: Companies couldn’t find enough skilled programmers. The perceived labor crisis became significant enough that in 1968, NATO held a conference to address the problem.
Programming was changing from something seen as secretarial work into a respectable career...and in the process, it was rebranded as male. CARLA BRODLEY: I think that until we make computer science required in high school and taught well in high school that probably girls in high school aren't going to naturally choose it because of the perception that they have.
KATIE HAFNER: And programming as we understand it today,, as this abstract and concrete challenge where you can create simulated realities, this all started right around the time Klari was coding. KATIE HAFNER: As George Dyson points out in Turing’s Cathedral, today’s search engine algorithms draw on the Monte Carlo method that Klari first executed. They don’t use a straight-line path from question to answer. Instead, they follow random search paths to find increasingly accurate results. They rely less on the end points and more on the intervening paths. And these paths hold meaning.
This has been Lost Women of Science. Thanks to everyone who made this initiative happen, including my co-executive producer Amy Scharf, producer Sophie McNulty, associate producer Ashraya Gupta, senior editor Nora Mathison, composer Elizabeth Younan, and the engineers at Studio D Podcast Production.
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