John Von Neumann was really a once in a lifetime mind

How come there's no threads like this jerking over Gauss? He's a bit more admirable in my opinion since he was literally raised by illiterate peasants

lol U got B8'd like a bitch

Yep mitpress.mit.edu/books/street-fighting-mathematics

Indian mathematicians I noticed have a lot of these kinds of tricks where they can quickly do calculations in their head since for years they were too poor tier to afford calculators or computers for classrooms

>these kinds of tricks where they can quickly do calculations in their head

It's way easier to just say algorithms

> I'll take who's Leonhard Euler for 500$

From George Pólya:

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.

Wasn't his father an accountant or something?

What a fucking plot twist

These fuckers are the reason I'm so fucking insecure

Nah dawg his dad was a poor as dirt bricklayer

but it's also wrong from a formal standpoint.

Gauss has become too normie
I mean we all obviously acknowledge him, but we have done it already long time ago

reminder, he believed in the Christian God

No he wasn't, lol. Stop making up bs.

No, he was just trying to hack the universe. He quickly "converted" on his deathbed.

Yeah he was

He did actually work as a treasurer for an insurance company for some period of time, although I doubt that really helped his son in math at all.

There's some story about Gauss helping his father with calculations and correcting mistakes.

No he's right, they are algorithms not heuristics.
If you haven't read about the trachtenberg system you can start now, the book is very simple and a 6 year old can read it and understands it, yet it gives alot of practical benifts, it also addresses how to calculate square roots efficiently in your head in later chapters:
drtayeb.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/trachtenberg-system.pdf

>In mathematics, the von Neumann conjecture stated that a group G is non-amenable if and only if G contains a subgroup that is a free group on two generators
>The conjecture was disproved in 1980

Most the quotes lauding von Neumann are from his kike contemporaries. It's all just a Jewish circle jerk.

Lol, that's bullshit. Go to Wikipedia.

Not all are algorithms. Some are, some are fuzzier sets of techniques with decisions you make along the way.

There's literally nothing on the internet that would contradict what I said dumb ass

Literally everything and every source other than your shady screenshot says exactly the opposite of what you're saying.

And that's why you haven't posted any sources from other websites

Cool bait kid

> He once conjectured something that was proven wrong 23 years after his death.
> "LOL dem joos, am I rite guise?"

>some are fuzzier sets of techniques with decisions you make along the way
yeah those are still algorithms, i think you don't understand the difference between an algorithm and a heuristic
An algorithm is guaranteed to give the right answer no matter how fuzzy or complicated it is.
A heuristic has some probability of giving the right answer and is used when algorithms are too slow.

An algorithm is a computable function.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_function

I'm always fascinated by the consistent levels of autism on Veeky Forums

Who are you quoting?

Why is the fact that Gauss came from poor parents being debated here?

i thought it was established fact

He had a remarkable mind, but his career mostly consisted of incremental work, or low hanging fruit.

For example the von Neumann architecture was already implemented in a working machine before von Neumann wrote his paper. His paper simply described the machine he had visited and offered some minor abstractions/improvements.

>All I did was sum the geometric series.
He was obviously trolling that guy

fucking this. if he was as intelligent as these stories make him out to be then he would obviously solve it in the most straightforward way.

Because retarded kiddies like to troll
The guy was obviously a genius so it's strange that he never made a major breakthrough, but sometimes discoveries come with luck (opportunity + preparation)

He did design the explosive lenses for the first nuclear bombs and the math behind that was on a whole nother level at the time.

he was wealthy enough to have a ranch and purchase a noble titles or some shit

>never made a major breakthrough

what is game theory?

It's another episode of retards propping up Neumann's intelligence because all his contemporaries exaggerated their biographies thread!

>Two bicyclists start twenty miles apart and head toward each other, each going at a steady rate of 10 mph. At the same time a fly that travels at a steady 15 mph starts from the front wheel of the southbound bicycle and flies to the front wheel of the northbound one, then turns around and flies to the front wheel of the southbound one again, and continues in this manner till he is crushed between the two front wheels. Question: what total distance did the fly cover? The slow way to find the answer is to calculate what distance the fly covers on the first, northbound, leg of the trip, then on the second, southbound, leg, then on the third, etc., etc., and, finally, to sum the infinite series so obtained. The quick way is to observe that the bicycles meet exactly one hour after their start, so that the fly had just an hour for his travels; the answer must therefore be 15 miles. When the question was put to von Neumann, he solved it in an instant, and thereby disappointed the questioner: "Oh, you must have heard the trick before!" "What trick?" asked von Neumann, "All I did was sum the geometric series."[16]

What the fuck? I solved this immediately, not joking. All I did when reading was recognise that they meet in an hour and got the answer straight away.

These stories are fucking exaggerated.

...

>he never made a major breakthrough
wow kill yourself honestly

When nuclear war finally happens, which it still may, perhaps we will think "damn, Johnny was right all along."

he did it straight away without the trick, is the point, your brainlet

>His genius was unprecedented

Shakespeare was greater

What the fuck are you talking about? I did it without the trick as well.

Are you fucking retarded? Both numbers are one hour!

>your brainlet

>knowing things is autism

top fucking jej m8

>all I did was recognize they meet in one hour
the point is he didn't recognize that first, he solved the geometric series first instantly before thinking about the problem

Now devise the explosive lens for a nuke
This reasoning is regenerative brake tier

That would mean he is retarded and not a genius

Thats kinda dumb

Should we just give up then?

He is considered the greatest poet of all time, producing many works of supreme literary value and creating more than thousands of characters.

Von Neumann couldn't do what Shakespeare could.

So the question is: who is greater, the greatest writer of all time or a mathematician who is not evne in the top-ten math names of history?

>who is not evne in the top-ten math names of history?

Look for Neumann here (there are several lists):

eoht.info/page/Greatest mathematician ever

He is not one of the greatest of all time.

Shakespeare, on the other hand, was the greatest master of language who has ever lived.

except von neumann's discoveries affect everyone everyday but most of the world will never read shakespeare

This is a different matter: a criterion of utility or influence on one's life. It does not seem to be a perfect criterion for defining human greatness. You can say that Hitler has affected more people than Shakespeare, you can say that the creators of Coca Cola affect more people than Neumann, or that Genghis Khan affected more people than Neumann (and certainly Henry Ford affected more people: would Henry Ford be considered more of a genius than Shakespeare, Newton, Einstein?).

The criteria for measuring the value of art are not simple - and perhaps not even possible - but it is well known that as long as human civilization exists, Shakespeare is going to be considered one of the prime examples of what our brains are capable of.

What's more, Neumann affects people by products derived from his findings. Should you not you give credit also to inventors and patents-makers and engineers behind such by-products instead of just the man who operated the mathematical question?

What is your criteria for genius? I would say Henry Ford was more of a genius than Einstein in terms of street knowledge but back to the main topic Von Neumann has far more brain processing power than shakespeare.

no, he supposedly said he did that.

>Von Neumann has far more brain processing power than shakespeare.

Not criticizing but genuinely interested: does calculating and working with mathematical abstractions in the mind demand more organic mental capacity than creating a series of extremely pleasant, revealing and original metaphors and weave them into verses or harmonic patterns of prose?

I was the guy defending Shakespeare, and I still believe he was superior to Neumann as a creative genius (people are writing in many places in the world for about 5,000 years but humanity has seen such a great verbal mastery only once). But it seems to me that working with mathematical creation really requires more of the brain than with verbal creation (even the most sublime).

But it would be interesting to read some study on such a topic. Do you have any?

ITT: Cucks who actually believe the made-up stories about Neumann

David Blackwell is based as fuck

Just bought his book on Game Theory

>comparing subjective art to math
Jesus it's like I'm on some retarded board like /sp/ or /tv/

>implying that art can't be analyzed objectively
Stick to your area

>implying that art can't be analyzed objectively
It can, but saying it's "good" or "bad" is always an opinion. ALWAYS, doesn't matter if many people agree

this

Newton, Gauss and Einstein are all far greater than him.

People found the wikipedia article on Neumann and started spiting out what they read there

>tfw if I met this fat cuck he'd be intimidated by me and would want me to like him
I tend to have that effect on betas

He literally didn't though fuck off stinky autistic retard

Turing is overrated and didn't really do shit. Von Neumann is legit. Babbage is god tier

Stop the race-bait.

STOP the race-baiting what the fuck is wrong with you?

Quality-wise Shakespeare work is more valuable.

The guy shortened the war by a few years and pretty much opened up the research into computers alongside a few other people and you're saying he did nothing?

Not triggered/mad, but I'm just genuinely wondering what makes you think he did nothing of value?

>writing poems
>hard
thou art a faggot

Look at this Veeky Forumstle faggot

Nice try but Ramanujan was greater.

>I was the guy defending Shakespeare, and I still believe he was superior to Neumann as a creative genius
You likely don't even know what an operator is, let alone evaluate Neumann's work.
Hang yourself now.

Well he's probably speaking in terms of contribution to humanity rather than contribution to pure math and in that sense he's right

>in terms of contribution to humanity
You're the usual Veeky Forums bastard who thinks he can get away comparing apples with oranges and without giving any reference.
>rather than contribution to pure math
>pure math
This is von Neumann's page on Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann.
You can see his contributions are well beyond pure mathematics.
Then he was very busy working for the government.
>On February 15, 1956, von Neumann was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. His citation read:
>"Dr. von Neumann, in a series of scientific study projects of major national significance, has materially increased the scientific progress of this country in the armaments field.]"
>"Through his work on various highly classified missions performed outside the continental limits of the United States in conjunction with critically important international programs, Dr. von Neumann has resolved some of the most difficult technical problems of national defense.[131]"

...

Try to write a play with the same poetic quality of Shakespeare. It can be a 1 act only play. I dare you.

You can write anything and call it poetry, and so any retard can be a poet. Now, to write something that is much greater in its verbal texture and imagistic beauty than all the other works of mankind in the field of words, that is the real deal.

/go to lit or fashion you imbecile art faggot

Says the guy who loves "muh movies", and "muh songs".

As if you could live happily only with math. Imagine a world without your Star Wars or your Marvel heroes or your Green Day or your Metalica.

Yeah, in the end of the day art matters to everyone, even people like you. And in the real of art figures like Shakespeare, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and Michelangelo are the greatest.

And btw, Newton, Einstein, Gauss are all far superior to Jancsi.

But let me give you a gift after this sour post. Here: take a look at Newton's originals manuscripst from his student days:

cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-03996/1

>As if you could live happily only with math. Imagine a world without your Star Wars or your Marvel heroes or your Green Day or your Metalica.

Dont forget his Harry Potter

>implying math isn't art

>>implying math isn't art

I agree: Math can very well be seen as some form of art (above all because the concept of art seems to be subjective).

What bothers me is that to some people it seems that the only relevant human beings, the only people that deserve the highest praise, are mathematicians, and that mathematicians would be capable of doing any other highly demanding activity better than anyone else. They seem to think that people like Neumann - if only they would leave the higher game-tables of pure math, the highest bidding poker-tables of human mental work, and grace the lower realms of literature or music or film or car-engineering or cooking, etc – would certainly exceed any previous gold standard.

Some people here are so obsessed with little gossip stories about Von Neumann’s easiness with mental math calculations that they probably think that, if he wanted to, he would compose greater music than Beethoven, write better tragedies than Shakespeare or Aeschylus, design better and more advanced rockets than Wernher von Braun. The only thing that prevented him from doing so was the time limit for so many activities, but if he could live 5000 years he would no doubt be the number 1 in all those areas.

People here seem to forget that Neumann’s mind was not the same as Heisenberg’s or Schrödinger’s, that he might have never imagined the things that those men imagined.

Some guys here seem to be constantly evaluating people with the same five-stars system that is presented in that Dark Mirror episode, Nosedive:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive

And only Von Neumann would rank a full five-star evaluation. Not even Newton or Einstein would achieve that much, since we don’t seem to have enough anecdotes about their capacity for making calculations in their heads.

>affirmative action the story
wew laddeh

what's harder:

A) writing a story
B) making major contributions to a number of fields, including mathematics (foundations of mathematics, functional analysis, ergodic theory, geometry, topology, and numerical analysis), physics (quantum mechanics, hydrodynamics, and quantum statistical mechanics), economics (game theory), computing (Von Neumann architecture, linear programming, self-replicating machines, stochastic computing), and statistics.

I understand your point of view, but reducing a literary work simply to "telling a story" is too simplistic even by the standards of sarcasm.

If I'm not mistaken Shakespeare did not even create his own plot. The value of his work lays mainly in its verbal and metaphorical texture. Poetic metaphors are like micro-stories inserted within a larger story, so while reading a Shakespeare play you experience something similar to a beehive (the play itself) full of bees (images, similes, metaphors).

I do not want to say that creating in the field of mathematics is less complex than in the verbal field: I believe it is somewhat less intuitive for people, it seems to require more effort. Math indeed seems to be harder. However the verbal and imaginative skills necessary to create a group of plays like Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Lear, Henry IV, A Midssumer Night Dream and The Tempest is something never seen in recorded literature. That means something never seen in an activity that was and is practiced by millions of people around the world, by thousands of people with serious intentions to achieve excellence

So you're acting like an artificial fool - it's obvious that you know better than that.

There is also the case that Shakespeare is the top achiever in his field, while Neumann cant compare to figures like Newton, Euler, Gauss and Einstein.

if they were written today, maybe they would become a movie and get good reviews. That's it.

If you look at history as a whole in terms of human achievement, we are certainly right now at a peak that is miles above the valley of Shakespeare's time. he's not famous because he was such a genius, he's famous because he was a high tier smart guy in a time of stupidity

We're using the internet, nigg. People have been to the moon. I look out my window and there are airplanes. There's lots of smart people in the world. Don't be a little bitch, writing a good story isn't that amazing

I love math and I work with chemistry, but even to me is plain to see that you are a fucking ignorant.

Fuck dude do you read your own posts? You come off as an inarticulate retard

Writing is a bit harder than you think it seems

>I see planes, therefore Shakespeare was just below average when the average was low

The amount of retardation is unbearable, stop typing

Thanks, m8.

yo, learn how to drive