
The Mathematician (1947) - jonnybgood
http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Extras/Von_Neumann_Part_1.html
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User23
John Von Neumann was a terrifyingly intelligent person. I've never read
anything by him that wasn't intellectually stimulating and rewarding. Thanks
for this.

~~~
jkuria
Indeed. There is an interesting discussion on Quora about whether he was
smarter than Einstein.

[https://www.quora.com/What-was-John-von-Neumanns-IQ-Was-
he-s...](https://www.quora.com/What-was-John-von-Neumanns-IQ-Was-he-smarter-
than-Einstein)

The conclusion seems to be that he had a higher raw IQ but Einstein was a
'deeper' thinker and better aesthetician. General relativity (which took
Einstein 10 years of 'thought experiments') is often considered the greatest
achievement of any single human mind. In Einstein's words:

"After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art
tend to coalesce in aesthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists
are artists as well." \- Albert Einstein, 1923

~~~
User23
From that page:

According to George Pólya:

“The only student of mine I was ever intimidated by. He was so quick. 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”.

~~~
gh02t
Worth noting for those who may not know, Pólya was himself an extremely
prolific mathematician with many major contributions to mathematics.

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baddash
Does anyone happen to know more about the relationship of mathematics with
philosophy and epistemology? This to me is more interesting than its
relationship with the natural sciences and empiricism; although analysis of
the latter relationship seems to have potential insight that is interesting as
well.

~~~
keiferski
The SEP is always a good place to start:
[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-
mathematics/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-mathematics/)

~~~
dstrohmaier
Philosophy of mathematics is just one part of the connection between
philosophy and mathematics. Many historical philosophers have been heavily
influenced by mathematical thinking.

To give just a few examples from European history of philosophy: Spinoza took
the geometric method (basically the axiomatic method) from Euclid. Kant is
heavily drawing on geometry and the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry has
been suggested as disproving him. If you look into Hegel's Encyclopedia of the
Sciences, you will find a lengthy discussion of calculus.

In current analytic philosophy there are many other areas of overlap and
cross-polination, for example in decision theory and metaphysics.

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gowld
Some kind of kerning or OCR error lead to the appearance of "modem mathmatics"
several times in the article.

Von Neumann predicted the Internet and arxiv and the polymath project ;-)

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kums
Beautiful.

