Ramanujan is an interesting comparison. He was an outstanding mathematician, but it feels like his prowess came from a deep love of math and concomitant time spent on it. There's an anecdote somewhere about child Ramanujan working his way through thousands of elementary lemmas for fun, and I wonder if this gave him the almost occult intuitive ability reported by his collaborators. The stories about him have a tone of awe, but not fear.

In some contrast, von Neumann seems to have been able to take his enormous fluid intelligence and speed and apply it to pretty much whatever problem he decided, and he did it across many areas, including non-scientific ones. The stories about him are tinged with a little unease, and it's a little harder to see the human underneath his achievements.

You are really deluding yourself if you think anyone can reach Ramanujan levels of skill by simply trying hard enough. This takes insane innate talent in addition to trying hard.

Yeah it’s like people thinking anyone can be a Micheal Jordan or Tiger Woods if they just tried hard enough, started young enough, were born in the right place to the right parents enough. Some people just have the gift, it’s like neural networks: some random weight initialisations are just better, some maybe even so close to optimum that almost no training is needed at all.

Ramanujan was extra-terrestrial. His note books have produced so many papers and PhD theses. Probably will continue to do so for many more years.

This is fascinating. Thanks for sharing.

Edward Witten probably falls into that category as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Witten