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.”
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