[Math] (Preferably rare) Audio/Video recordings of famous mathematicians

big-listho.history-overviewsoft-question

Terence Tao's homepage has a link to a collection of quotes, and one among them was Hilbert's famous "We must know, we will know" quote. This quote also had an audio link to it. Now although I'm not sure if it is really Hilbert's voice in the link, this prompted me to ask if we could have a collection of (rare) audio/video recordings of mathematicians which are freely available on the internet.

Let me add, however, that I am not asking for audio/video recordings of mathematicians which are fairly recent (a typical example of which I am NOT asking for are TED talks or podcasts). Recordings of famous mathematicians of the early twentieth and mid twentieth century will be wonderful. (I've always wanted to find out how Von Neumann's voice sounded like!).

Addendum: Are there any videos or audio excerpts of any talks given by Grothendieck which are available anywhere? I'd be grateful if anyone could post any such links. Thanks in advance.

Best Answer

The voice of John von Neumann dedicating the NORC computer in 1954 (short excerpt and full speech).

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(source: washington.edu)

The wire recording is a bit murky; here is my best-effort transcript of the short excerpt:

"Those of you present who have lived with this field, and who have lived with and suffered with computing machines of various sorts, and know what kind of regime it is to invest in one, I'm sure have appreciated the fact that it appears that this machine has been completely assembled less than two months ago, has been run on problems less than two weeks ago, and yesterday already ran for four hours without making a mistake. Those of you who have not been exposed to computing machines, and who do not have the desolate feeling which goes with living with their mistakes, will appreciate what it means that a computing machine, after about two weeks of breaking in, has really a faultless run of four hours. It is completely fantastic on an object of this size; I doubt it has ever been achieved before, and it is an enormous reassurance regarding the state of the art and regarding the complexities to which one will be able to go in the future, that this has been achieved."

Here is the BibTeX reference to a printed version (which differs slightly from the speech).

@incollection{vonNeumann:54,
Author = {J. von Neumann},
Booktitle = {John von Neumann Collected Works},
Editor = {A. H. Taub},
Publisher = {Pergamon Press},
Title = {The N.O.R.C.~and Problems in High Speed Computing},
Volume = {5},
Year = 1954,
Pages = 238--247}
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