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Comment by cinntaile | Hacker News Reader

> His mind is the kind of mind that comes along only once in a millennia.

I'm sure the guy was smart, but lets not overdo it.

I don't think you can overdo it when it comes to Jansci

“There was a seminar for advanced students in Zürich that I was teaching and von Neumann was in the class. I came to a certain theorem, and I said it is not proved and it may be difficult. von Neumann didn’t say anything but after five minutes he raised his hand. When I called on him he went to the blackboard and proceeded to write down the proof. After that I was afraid of von Neumann” — George Pólya

“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.” — Edward Teller

...One afternoon around 4:50 p.m. John von Neumann came by and saw what Fermi had on the blackboard and asked what he was doing. So Enrico told him and John von Neumann said “That’s very interesting.” He came back about 15 minutes later and gave him the answer. Fermi leaned against his doorpost and told me, “You know that man makes me feel I know no mathematics at all.” — Enrico Fermi

”You know, Herb, Johnny can do calculations in his head ten times as fast as I can. And I can do them ten times as fast as you can, so you can see how impressive Johnny is” — Enrico Fermi again

“One had the impression of a perfect instrument whose gears were machined to mesh accurately to a thousandth of an inch.” — Eugene Wigner

It goes on and on...

https://superintelligence.fandom.com/wiki/John_von_Neumann_(...

How does this tell us something about the last 1000 years? You want to call him the smartest man of the 20th century sure go ahead, but you hardly have any idea about the other 9 centuries.

Can you point to anyone like him in the recorded history of the last thousand years? There may well be some whose lives were unrecorded or of whom the records were lost.

Gauss comes to mind.

Gauss far exceeded von neuman in mathematical impact and pushing math forward. So did many other mathematicians that were contemporaries of von neuman. The same for physics. Von Neuman would not even be in the list of top 10 mathematicians in the 20th Century, let alone of all time. The twentieth century had giants like Kolmogorov, Hilbert, Grothendieck, none of whom were smarter than von neumann, but they made far greater discoveries.

But this just shows that when you are talking about impact as opposed to intelligence, a lot of things other than IQ come into play. I am certain von neumann was much smarter than Gauss, but Gauss had an instinct for discovery that was remarkable. Newton is another example -- someone not nearly as brilliant as Von Neuman (my impression) but had an incredibly deep insight and much bigger impact. They say that Feynman's IQ was ~120, which would certainly be lower than von neuman, but he made a much bigger impact as well.

I wouldn’t go far as to say Von Neumann was smarter than Grothendieck. I think they’re both different types of geniuses, where their genius manifest in different ways. Grothendieck was a genius in working with extremely deep abstractions, I’d say he eclipses Von Neumann in this way, whereas Von Neumann had a different type of genius in which he eclipsed others at. In Grothendieck’s case he was a profound genius, who made profound impacts in mathematics.

Another mathematician that reminds me of Von Neumann is Euler. He also memorized long passages and could do complicated calculations in his head quickly.

A quote on Euler from wikipedia:

“He was able to, for example, repeat the Aeneid of Virgil from beginning to end without hesitation, and for every page in the edition he could indicate which line was the first and which was the last even decades after having read it”

>I wouldn’t go far as to say Von Neumann was smarter than Grothendieck

He famously recounted his inability to derive Heron's formula for the area of a triangle when he was a teenager (despite realizing that such a formula ought to exist via conceptual reasoning), and seems to have subsequently kept an unbalanced set of talents in the same vein.

Grothendieck was the best in class at abstract mathematical reasoning and some regard him as the best mathematician in the 20th century. The Heron Formula or “prime” example doesn’t negate that

Yes that's my point, it's pretty much impossible to guarantee that he's the smartest of the last 1000 years.

Survivorship bias is maybe the worst bias of our time. It's so ubiquitous.

His wikipedia page goes into more detail on that front. Considered the top mathematician of his time (with also major contributions to physics and computer science), other world-class mathematicians and physicists being in awe of his abilities, sometimes solving (never before answered) math problems easily, being able to recite word-for-word the books and articles he read, years after reading them, simultaneously translating them as necessary, etc.

Ordinarily that would be hyperbole...

Maybe Newton was on the same level? Or Gauss? Or Leonardo?

Or maybe not.

There have probably been dozens of people in the past millennium who had the potential to develop that kind of mind, but most of them probably lived and died without the opportunity to develop their gifts, whether because of enslavement, rural poverty, or lack of access to education.

I really don't know if that's overdoing it. Da Vinci might compare, but I suspect that even he would be in awe at some of Neumann's abilities.

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