A funny quote about him from a Edward “a guy with multiple equations named after him” Teller:
> Edward Teller observed "von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us."
I was replying to “even the known knowledge is extremely hard for talented university students to learn”. If complexity of the known knowledge one must learn to substantially contribute is the reason becoming an accomplished multidisciplinary is impossible nowadays, then it sounds like we could use some better models and levels of abstraction.
I'm obviously using the archetype of Leibniz here as an example but pick your favorite polymath.
JVM was one of the smartest ever, but Euler was there centuries before and shows up in so many places.
If I had a Time Machine I'd love to get those two together for a stiff drink and a banter.
https://youtu.be/Oh31I1F2vds?t=189 Describes Von Neumann's final days struggle when he couldn't think. Thinking, an activity which he loved the most.
John Von Neumann once said to Felix Smith: "Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them." This was a response to Smith's fear about the method of characteristics.
It took me a while to fully grasp what he meant, but after diving into Mathematics and Physics for a while, I now hold it as one of the capital T truths of learning.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_coin#Fair_results_from_...
>> This hasn’t been strictly shown mathematically, but I think it is true.
That's simply a lie.
> who thinks the age of consent is too high
Too high in which country? Such laws vary strongly, even by US state, and he is from Denmark. Anyway, this has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
Thus, the law had to be fixed for more urban/civilized times up to 16. Altough depending on the age/mentality closeness (such as 15-19 as it happened with a recent case), the young adult had its charges totally dropped.
"My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it 'information,' but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it 'uncertainty.' When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, 'You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.'"
See the answers to this MathOverflow SE question (https://mathoverflow.net/questions/403036/john-von-neumanns-...) for references on the discussion whether Shannon's entropy is the same as the one from thermodynamics.