Comment by nish__
13 hours ago
> Budapest around 1900 produced an absurd cluster of minds: von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Paul Erdős, Theodore von Kármán, George Pólya.
Not to mention Nikola Tesla about 20 years prior.
> When several of them turned up at Los Alamos and realized they had gone to high school together, Szilard joked that Hungary was a cover story for a Martian landing.
What if there actually are people who go to Mars in the future but regret it and the only way for them to come back to Earth is to invent a time machine and be reborn as a mathematical supergenius. That would explain this at least:
> At six, Janos (the OG hungarian name for Johnny) could divide eight-digit numbers in his head and hold a conversation in ancient Greek. He later added Latin, French, German, English, and Yiddish. The rumor was that he remembered everything he ever read. Many years later Herman Goldstine decided to test this by asking him to recite "A Tale of Two Cities." Von Neumann started on chapter one and had to be asked to stop fifteen minutes later.
ACX has a review on book that goes on exploring this: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-man-from-th...
Tesla was educated in Graz and was only in Budapest for about a year
> That would explain this at least:
There are more pedestrian explanations. https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/john-von-neumann-s...
Ha! thank you. Doubted these crazy anecdotes. Often we're tempted to repeat them to impress our audience. I know I do..
I once stumbled across a video on the Two Minute Papers YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TwoMinutePapers
I remarked to myself how much the speaker sounded like Ren Hoëk, from The Ren and Stimpy Show. Then I looked up the name of the channel host: Károly Zsolnai-Fehér.
I thought to myself: Huh. Hungarian. That explains the mathematical prowess—and the voice. (Ren's voice is a pastiche of Hungarian actor Peter Lorre.)
It's worth keeping in mind in the 1900s the bar for novelty was much lower. Today you'd have to learn vastly more to even stand a chance of making a single contribution , let alone as many as he had done.
That's true at the beginning of a new field. I'm noted for some advances in network architecture. But when I did that, everybody working on the Internet could meet in one large classroom. If you were reasonably good, you could make major progress.
Computer science used to be tiny. In the late 1970s, AI was a few tens of people at MIT, at Stanford, and at CMU, with a few smaller groups elsewhere. I met about half the greats of my generation, as did everyone else who was serious. There were almost no textbooks in the early 1970s. When Knuth's Fundamental Algorithms came out, it was great to finally see what had previously been folklore on mimeographed sheets in an actual book.
I was involved with Autodesk in its very early days. Even went to the founding meeting. The feeling was that PCs were finally getting big enough to be interesting. The founders were all mainframe programmers, and the people who came up from 4K memory on an 8088 had no idea how to organize a big program. But mainframe people did.
There was a vast emptyness in the product space ready to be filled. Products considered were a window manager ("AutoScreen"), a text editor (Kern Sibbald actually built that), a database, and a CAD program. None of those existed yet as successful products. CAD was picked because the productivity gain was so huge vs. paper and pencil drafting. At the time, the state of the art in drawing editing was drawing on mylar and using an electric eraser to delete. Then you ran the Mylar master through a big copier to make blueprints or whiteprints. A CAD system on a PC was a very easy sell.
So all you had to do was make it work. No need to overcome the noise level of a thousand similar "apps".
Today you'd have to be an LLM.