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Motivation is key here. It seems that von Neumann became too fond of prestige and spy stuff. So he was less creative. Smarter than Gödel, able to recognise the importance of Gödel's work, but unable to produce anything of similar moment.

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One could call it a feeling of responsibility maybe. The ongoing conflicts were defining the world and scientists (and he individually) could change the course of history. I think vNM's work is equally impressive (or even more; it's difficult to compare), maybe his main contribution is starting Game Theory[1]; but because it is spread across so many fields it doesn't look as groundbreaking.

[1]: Indeed he was so confident in his work he believed he was "Starting and ending" game theory, that there would be little else to work on after his monumental work that is OTGEB. He was very wrong of course, but like other theories of the kind (Information Theory comes to mind), this early lead is very significant to the creation of a coherent field.

'Feeling of responsibility' is a nice way of putting it but the fact is that creative geniuses are pretty irresponsible and unconscientious fellows. They abandon a lot of projects and can't force themselves to work on things that don't interest them.

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