[TriEmbed] "Pure pursuits of study vs engineering" quote

[Pete Soper]

(In reference to the engineers sharing space in the Institute for Advanced Studies building in Princeton, NJ with the academics in the fall of 1946 as one of the first stored program computers was being created.)
"As they moved up from the boiler room to the first basement directly below the ground floor of Fuld Hall there were vocal protests on all fronts. To the Humanists the computer people where mathematitions and to the mathematitions they where engineers. 'Even the curiosity so natural to all scientific people was overruled by the passionate distance toward anything that might conceivably deviate from from pure and theoretical thinking', Claire von Neumann [wife of John von Neumann] explained. Bigelow [one of the EEs] describes the situation as one of 'People who have to think of what they were trying to do objecting to people who seem to know what they were trying to do'.'"
For the sake of the second inner quote that a few of you may appreciate I  transcribed this from the audio version of  Dyson's book Turing's Cathedral.
Pete

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