It is a serious indictment of our culture that we are not trying to clone von Neumann or even just sequence his genome. His genetic material is slowly decaying in some cemetery in New Jersey, I think.
And I'm not even talking about the cloning. Is there really, among the 8 billion of us now, no one who is at least half as brilliant?
I think there is, but they fall out all the time.
My good childhood friend is such a person - a prodigy child whom I heard about thanks to his achievements in math contests years before I met him in middle school. Of course he did great there because everything was just so simple to him.
Something went wrong mid-college and he never realised his potential to the fullest.
I think there's a lot more randomness to which of the potential von Neumanns will shine than we would like to admit.
You'd expect for any of his kids to be outstanding, but not earth-shatteringly so. And looks like that's about right if you look up his daughter [1].
[0] Check out his "known for" section in Wikipedia! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_von_Neumann_Whitman
People greatly underestimate just how effective children can learn. They're basically capable of absorbing as much information as you can pump into them. It's a delicate balance making sure they learn enough basic human operating stuff in addition to everything else, but the results can be remarkable.
I remember hanging out at camp with a kid who loved board games. Especially probability based ones, such liar's dice and Dominion, but also more general hidden information games like Stratego. Kid was undeniably a prodigy, and he kicked my ass every time. I had just graduated university with studying CS and Physics, this kid was looking forward to starting kindergarten in the fall.