Notes to Chapter 2 239
Members of this group include mathematician and founding computer scientist and
game theorist John von Neumann; pan-prolific mathematician Paul Erdős; Nobel
laureate and founder of holography Dennis Gabor; Nobel laureate and physicist
Eugene Wigner; early supersonic aerospace engineer Theodore von Kármán; discov-
erer of the linear accelerator, the electron microscope, and nuclear chain reaction
Leo Szilard; the primary force behind the hydrogen bomb Edward Teller; codevel-
oper of BASIC computer programming John George Kemeny; historian Oszkar Jaszi;
philosopher Georg Lukacs, economist and philosopher Karl Polanyi; author Arthur
Koesler; and composer Bela Bartok. Gabor Pallo, “The Hungarian Phenomenon in
Israeli Science,” Bulletin of the History of Chemistry 25 (1) (2000): 35–42.
- Independent of Kantorovich, Von Neumann and George Dantzig developed
similar methods in the United States after the war. - To add some numbers to the basic problem: assume that a square meter of pota-
toes costs two rubles to grow and sells at six rubles and that a square meter of wheat
costs three rubles and sells at seven rubles. Given 100 square meters, the linear pro-
grammer might ask, “What proportion of potatoes and wheat will maximize reve-
nue?” In practice, programmers struggled to address massively more complicated
programs, factoring into their matrices and algorithms the constraints, costs, and
effects of dozens or hundreds of variables from pesticides, fertilizer, and soil degra-
dation. - Iosif V. Stalin, Voprosy leninizma, 11th ed. (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1951), 326.
- Abraham S. Becker, “Input-Output and Soviet Planning: A Survey of Recent
Developments,” paper prepared for the United States Air Force Project RAND, Mem-
orandum, RM 3523-PR, March 1963, accessed July 18, 2013, http://www.dtic.mil/
cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=AD0401490. - V. S. Nemchinov, O dalneishem sovershenstvovanii planirovaniya i upravleniya
narodnym khozyaistvom. Moscow: Ekonomika, 1964: 1–74. V. S. Nemchinov, “Sotsial-
isticheskoe khozyaistvovanie i planirovanie proizvodstva,” Kommunist (1964): 5. - A. Birman, “Neotvratimost,” Zvezda 5 (1978): 1–5.
- Boris Nikolaevich Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, ed. Anne Fitzpatrick,
trans. Emmanuel Aronie, 2010, accessed April 15, 2015, http://www.sigcis.org/files/
SIGCISMC2010_001.pdf, esp. “Personal Reminisces of Viktor Glushkov,” 34–59. - Adamsky, The Culture of Military Innovation, 26–31; Kapitonova and Letichevsky,
Paradigmi i idei akademika V.M. Glushkova, 164. - Stark, The Sense of Dissonance, 1–34, see also 35–51, 54–80.
- Spufford, Red Plenty, 208–209.
- Kornai, The Socialist System, 121.