When we first started researching Klára Dán von Neumann, we thought she was “the computer scientist you should thank for your smartphone’s weather app.” It turns out that’s not true
We saw the story over and over again: computer programmer Klára Dán von Neumann was a pioneer in weather forecasting. But when we talked to Thomas Haigh, a historian who studies Dán von Neumann’s work, he said he’s found absolutely no evidence of this. How did this weather myth start? We set out to answer that question.
I hope my voice doesn’t sound too different, because I’m recording from my closet, on day 16 of COVID isolation. KATIE HAFNER: When we first started looking into Klári’s story, we found article after article calling her the lost figure you should thank for modern-day weather forecasting, so that was intriguing. And several of the articles quoted somebody named John Knox…so we got in touch with him.
ARCHIVAL TAPE: This is weather. One of nature's ever changing mysteries…Now recent experiments show that…data from guided weather rockets, radar observation stations, weather stations, all of this can be fed into the computer…all in a matter of minutes. And it’s not implausible that Klári did more for these experiments than she was given credit for. For starters, Klári was the expert in coding the ENIAC at this time. Plus, this weather work was done by a team that included her husband. And it took place at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, which is where Klári lived and worked. And like always, when we had a question related to Klári’s work, we asked Thomas Haigh.
THOMAS HAIGH: That was the first time I'd come across this article or the general idea that Klára von Neumann was the guiding force behind the numerical weather simulations. John Knox is quoted in the article, saying that Klári trained the scientists on how to program and that she checked the final code—which is basically what the acknowledgement says in that 1950 paper.
SOPHIE MCNULTY: And during lunch, we were waiting in line to get our food. And Katie, I just remember like your face, just distraught. You were like, guys, I don't know if we have a season. KATIE HAFNER: Once we spoke with George, all the pieces started falling into place. We learned about Klári’s work with the Monte Carlo Method and with nuclear weapons. And we had our season.
THOMAS HAIGH: So it’s saying that she was doing the same job for the meteorology project—being hands on, writing the code, working with the punch cards, setting the thing up—that she did with the Monte Carlo simulations. Tom points out that there isn't always a paper trail. It's possible that Klári was talking face to face with people in Princeton, and we just don't have a way of finding out one way or another. But if you've learned anything about Tom from listening to this season, you know that he's anything but careless.
In the meantime, we told John Knox about Tom’s findings: That while Klári was the expert on coding for the ENIAC, there was not any evidence that she was the one who coded or ran the program for the weather simulations. Maybe that acknowledgment in the 1950 paper was entirely appropriate for what she had done. Maybe she had, in fact, been an advisor and nothing more.
KATIE HAFNER: So maybe Klári didn’t actually do much on the computer itself for this project. That credit probably belongs to the operators. But Klári does get pretty high billing.KATIE HAFNER: And she's the very first. But with history, one misremembered or misattributed event can spiral. It enters the record—from a lecture in a classroom, to an article online, to Klára von Neumann’s Wikipedia entry. And I get it. It’s a good story: the woman who invented modern weather prediction. But it’s not the right story.
CAITLIN RIZZO: You know, it’s many, many days, like each notebook, roughly maps onto a month of labor of someone sitting at this computer and just writing down, this is what calculation was off. CAITLIN RIZZO: They are these amazingly brilliant women who maybe were not as credited in academia, right? But who were on this campus and did amazing work.CAITLIN RIZZO: Um, so I mentioned the Smagorinskys. That's, that's one.
KATIE HAFNER: Caitlin has a word for the kind of work that often goes missing from the historical record… KATIE HAFNER: At Lost Women of Science, we try to find the work that didn't always get top billing. And often the evidence of that work is incomplete, so we might be tempted to read between the lines. But after talking to John Knox, I knew that his well-intentioned attempts to highlight Klári’s contributions were misdirected. He took that footnote and ran with it.
KATIE HAFNER: When Tom and his co-author Mark Priestley were working on ENIAC in Action, they made a point of tracking down as many names as they could.