John von Neumann Shot Lightning from His Arse

(theintrinsicperspective.com)

36 points | by paulpauper a day ago ago

5 comments

  • discoutdynamite a day ago ago

    My second favorite Johnny story is how he did the math for the explosive lenses on the atom bomb, overnight. What we now call partial derivatives, was not yet rigourously proven and studied, but he signed off on it, and it worked. For the sake of the contention in the article, I am distinctly thinking of Grigori Perelman as almost an echo to this phenomenon. He felt his contributions were useful but not miraculous, and himself almost ordinary, that he was being recognized more for sake of national/racial partisanship.

  • Neywiny a day ago ago

    I had a professor for a computer architecture class who would make up stories of smart things von Neumann could have said. That's how bad this is

  • lern_too_spel 21 hours ago ago

    He was the Jeff Dean of his age, but somewhere along the way, people decided to take the "facts" seriously. https://github.com/LRitzdorf/TheJeffDeanFacts

  • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF a day ago ago

    I hope Wikipedia gets updated

    • tim333 7 hours ago ago

      That article is not especially protected so you can go in and edit if you feel so inclined. I edit sometimes and it can be kind of fun. You have to have citations for the things changed though or it'll get reverted.