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Comment by mjreacher | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately there has been lack of academic literature on this too on how he was able to solve problems so quickly. Much of what is known can only gathered from anecdotes from those who knew him personally. Edward Teller said in an interview that von Neumann enjoyed thinking more than anything else and did it all the time. This fits in well with other anecdotes. He was known to leave parties for periods of time to go to his room and write things down. He slept for only 4 hours a day and at night worked on problems. From what's been said of him he clearly spent basically his entire time thinking and working through problems. Then of course his favored way of attacking problems was axiomatically so he had some systematic way of going about this too. The end result of someone who spends a lot of time solving problems is that they know how to solve a lot of problems when they come up again.

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> He slept for only 4 hours a day

Edison as well. Interesting that.

When I was a teen, I was introduced to a friend of my step-father's that had the same affliction — he slept only 3 or 4 hours a day. He had told me it was unusual. I don't know how unusual it is. If it is common enough then von Neumann and Edison having the same inclination is of no significance.

I believe the reason can be genetic https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/gene-id...

JvN grinding LeetCode before it was cool

He would get rejected by a hiring committee. Not from the right school and not a social fit due to his preference of working with very loud German march music.

> slept for only 4 hours a day

I've only really seen this mentioned in comments. All references I could find state that he often slept until late (for example, he liked to sleep until after 10AM).

I would be wary of glorifying extremely short sleep patterns, they are unhealthy for 90% of the population.

Well you basically just described me, but I’m no JvN.

Well if you can solve problems of functional analysis or linear programming while at a party with others I must congratulate you, you're probably half way there lol

He died at 54. It surely wasn't good for his health to sleep only 4 hours every night.

Possibly, funnily enough his daughter mentions in her book that in hindsight one of the first signs of cancer was that he started sleeping for 7 or 8 hours a day!

Maybe it had to do with the radiation exposure in Manhattan project.

Let's reverse that: if he had not only slept 4 hours every night he would have gotten a lot less done in his life.

If sleeping 8h/day would grant him, say, ten more years, that would more than paid those extra 4h of awake time over his entire adult life, as 34x(1/6) < 10x(2/3).

Y’all know he died of cancer, right?

It's possible a lack of sleep reduced his immune response to the cancer. The body has some natural cancer fighting mechanisms, and it's only the mutations that escape these that become malignant tumors.

It’s possible. But what’s more possible is spending the latter half of his life working on nuclear weapons and observing bomb tests took their toll.

It’s interesting how you guys are latching onto this man’s lack of sleep to speculate why he died young instead of the more obvious possibility, given his background.

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