Plus we haven’t had enough time to make myths about the recent times. Of course the 20th century was incredible for physics, but we don’t know yet what will make the recent years special. We may, for example, in 80 years wonder about how it was that the early 21st century produced so many ambitious, large-scale experiments.
And this situation comes because all (or the great majority) of the easy theorems have been proved for most established branches of math.
This also means great discoveries are coming at a later age for mathematicians, as simply getting up to speed in complex fields takes years.
All of this implies it would be hard to have another Von Neumann today.
But for example, one could call the endeavor of classifying all the finite simple groups a big collaborative project.
Einstein wasn't wasted away his years at the patent office.
Also you could say that the greatest minds of the 20th century all engaged in coming up with bigger and bigger explosions for the military.
And so on.
The silver lining is that many of these companies publicly release their research. i.e. Rob Pike and Ken Thompson may be working on advertising, but we can still benefit from Golang.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasori_Gimn%C3%A1zium
Hungary had a great education system at the time.
I seriously doubt you could back this. You are generalizing from a single school. Might as well argue that socialist Hungary had a great education system because of Fazekas. Neither are true. I happen to have a maths teacher degree from a Hungarian university and we studied Hungarian education history and I learned much more about education systems later on my own (and this is not to say this university maths teacher course was a good one, quite the opposite). If you want to know what great education at the time looked like, read up on Summerhill -- it was founded in 1921 but humanistic education has been around for centuries.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-28582-5_...
What utter baloney! There were a few, very few special math classes that went against the system which delivered results. I went to one, I should know...
[1]: https://www.imo-official.org/results_country.aspx?column=awa...
https://www.imo-official.org/year_country_r.aspx?year=2019&c...
The city Lwów, or Lviv as Ukrainians now call it, had a great school and the city changed hands during war.
Also, Polish mathematicians from other universities played an important part in breaking the Enigma. They developed the Bombe, the cryptographic machine later sent to UK, which was then refined and used to break it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombe
More generally, I suspect it was something about the era and its culture that valued intellect and sciences. These days people like that are often put down as nerds. Leaders and extraverts are praised and set as examples. Celebrities are also a modern invention, I see them as something quite distinct from "stars". The only requirement to be a celebrity is to be popular.
Also, these days people would rather worship CEOs.
Just a recent example: a Prezi.com founder decided to create an alternative private school to show and lead by example. They didn't get the accreditation this year. If you stick out, they shut you down.
I have a theory that maths being taught as a skill, instead of an intuitive system, derivable from axioms as with Euclid may a cause.
It doesn't surprise me at all that the current political climate is not great for fostering great minds.
I hope you mean this in the literal sense, in that they are both people who have taken the scientific contributions of others for their own businesses, and somehow get the credit for work they never did.
We have since invented TV, computer games, quantitative finance and web frameworks. All these things cause massive brain drain.