Marina von neumann whitman biography of christopher

From her marriage partner to her career choices, Marina von Neumann Whitman ’56 has always known what she wanted.

Growing up in the household of a faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study—a leading research center in Princeton, New Jersey—meant having Albert Einstein as a frequent dinner guest and a childhood focused on high intellectual standards.

“I was my father’s only child, which means all his expectations were focused on me,” recalls Whitman, whose Hungarian father, John von Neumann, is known as the creator of game theory. “It was pretty intense.”

In fact, Whitman initially wanted to strike a path away from her father’s.

“She said that she wanted to go into a field where her father was not particularly a specialist,” says Morton White, who taught Whitman in Humanities 5 and is an emeritus professor of philosophy and intellectual history at the Institute. “My reply was it’s going to be very hard to find a field like that.”

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