Maybe not “I’ll invent the computer, game theory, and the hydrogen bomb at the same time” levels of genius;
JVN did not invent the computer or the hydrogen bomb. He contributed to the design of both, and both were group project(there were many early computers!), but teller is more responsible for the bomb and Turing and many others more responsible for digital computers . Where does this hero worship of JVN on this site come from? This tendency to assign all credit to him? Is it because he was a mentant? His mentant abilities probably overinflated his reputation in the pre computational era but would be much less useful or impressive today (and were clearly not an outsized advantage even then)
Where does this hero worship of JVN on this site come from?
It comes from the people who worked with him. Even great minds like Teller, who you mentioned, held him in awe:
Edward Teller observed “von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us.”
Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe said “I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann’s does not indicate a species superior to that of man”.
Claude Shannon called him “the smartest person I’ve ever met”, a common opinion.
To my knowledge, no one else in history has had such a large impact over so many fields (mathematics, physics, computer science, engineering, statistics, game theory, economics). If he had been an economist and nothing more he would still be famous.
Peter Lax commented that von Neumann would have won a Nobel Prize in Economics had he lived longer
Paul Samuelson wrote, “We economists are grateful for von Neumann’s genius. It is not for us to calculate whether he was a Gauss, or a Poincaré, or a Hilbert. He was the incomparable Johnny von Neumann. He darted briefly into our domain and it has never been the same since.”
JVN did not invent the computer or the hydrogen bomb. He contributed to the design of both, and both were group project(there were many early computers!), but teller is more responsible for the bomb and Turing and many others more responsible for digital computers . Where does this hero worship of JVN on this site come from? This tendency to assign all credit to him? Is it because he was a mentant? His mentant abilities probably overinflated his reputation in the pre computational era but would be much less useful or impressive today (and were clearly not an outsized advantage even then)
It comes from the people who worked with him. Even great minds like Teller, who you mentioned, held him in awe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann
To my knowledge, no one else in history has had such a large impact over so many fields (mathematics, physics, computer science, engineering, statistics, game theory, economics). If he had been an economist and nothing more he would still be famous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann