Re:What John von Neumann Did at Los Alamos
by rowanG077 on Monday April 08, 2024 @01:18AM
(#39966424)
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.
Re:What John von Neumann Did at Los Alamos
by laichzeit0 on Monday April 08, 2024 @02:20AM
(#39966752)
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.
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.