71–80 of 324 posts
I have always wondered how close von Neumann was to the maximum human potential. Does he sit close the outer edge of possible human potential, or can greater geniuses be created? Is there anyone alive who even comes close to Johnny?
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4 on your list are Hungarian, and 3 of them went to the same high school: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasori_Gimn%C3%A1zium Hungary had a great education system at the time.
What made the school great? Was it brilliant teachers, or some replicable system? 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.
"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 See [0] for a demonstration. I watched a documentary from the 80ies a long time ago. A mathematician (can't remember his name) who worked with von Neumann in Los Alamanos was interviewed. He described von…
That person you quoted was Edward Teller and the interview can be found at 54:58 [1].
I read somewhere that the young boy asking von Neumann a question at 6:13 [2] is actually Bill Clinton. Can anyone verify this?
[0] https://youtu.be/Y2jiQXI6nrE
"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 See [0] for a demonstration. I watched a documentary from the 80ies a long time ago. A mathematician (can't remember his name) who worked with von Neumann in Los Alamanos was interviewed. He described von…
My Dad says that von Neumann liked to play his music loud and work late at night with no interruptions. I remember Edward Teller coming to a costume party at our house and my Mom and one of her friends had a white bird costume for him to wear. He refused to wear the bird’s head, just wore the white wings. The next day in Herb Cain’s newspaper column he incorrectly talked about Edward Teller wearing an angel of peace costume.
Wouldn't einstein qualify as the most intelligent human ever lived?
He newer took an IQ test (or at least it isn't known) so nobody knows. Personally I think Mozart was smarter, but who knows.
Von Neumann invented a novel paradigm for computing using harmonic integration of analog oscillations. The patent was granted after his death. While there were a few prototypes in the 50s, the transistor killed it. A fully functional version of this computational architecture has never been built, to my knowledge: https://patents.google.com/patent/US2815488A/en
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4 on your list are Hungarian, and 3 of them went to the same high school: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasori_Gimn%C3%A1zium Hungary had a great education system at the time.
Sadly, not anymore. The government is doing everything to dumb down education and research in academia. It's really pathetic. We are doomed for generations thanks to this. 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.
Awww, I was hoping they'd mention how Neumann was keen on launching a preemptive nuclear strike against the USSR.
"“If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?” Hardly surprising that he was one of the influences on the character of Dr Strangelove. Was he a remarkable genius, absolutely - was he right about everything, definitely not.
Consider that several nations had avoided war as hard as possible prior to WW2. Standing by as entire countries we absorbed by a hostile power. In the end it only resulted in much greater destruction. Many people like JVN saw the same theme playing out with the iron curtain, and the destructiveness of the weapons only increasing over time.
The thought process was:
"We need to have a destructive war now to avoid having an earth shattering war later."
There had just been two world spanning wars in their lifetime. They considered a third inevitable. If it was going to happen at some point, better that it occurs before world ending arsenals were constructed.
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IQ is positively correlated with health, educational achievement, job performance, income and occupational status and negatively correlated with out of wedlock childbirth and being convicted of a crime. Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns, American Psychological Association http://differentialclub.wdfiles.com/local--files/definitions...
people dont like being shown things that dispute their world view, especially on things which wield as much weight as intelligence, which is why i assume youve been downvoted. IQ may not be an exact metric of intelligence, but the correlations of IQ to success in the modern western world are too obvious to ignore, and indeed could be detrimental to ignore. Note, correlation does not equate causation, but suggests dee…
I'm pretty sure there is some bias in the selection. I've never knew someone who has effectively passed a real IQ test around me, and I guess it the same thing for most people in the western world.
On top of that, we must do not forget that we're talking here about outliers, people whose intelligence (whatever your definition of it it is) is - to quote your own words - too obvious to ignore. People at the far edge on the "Bell curve of intelligence". Nobody will argue that Hawking was brilliant, he was not in good health though.
Of course, saying that being smart helps you achieve something in life is obvious. As well as being well connected. As well as being healthy.