My second favorite Johnny story is how he did the math for the explosive lenses on the atom bomb, overnight. What we now call partial derivatives, was not yet rigourously proven and studied, but he signed off on it, and it worked. For the sake of the contention in the article, I am distinctly thinking of Grigori Perelman as almost an echo to this phenomenon. He felt his contributions were useful but not miraculous, and himself almost ordinary, that he was being recognized more for sake of national/racial partisanship.

I had a professor for a computer architecture class who would make up stories of smart things von Neumann could have said. That's how bad this is

I hope Wikipedia gets updated

That article is not especially protected so you can go in and edit if you feel so inclined. I edit sometimes and it can be kind of fun. You have to have citations for the things changed though or it'll get reverted.

He was the Jeff Dean of his age, but somewhere along the way, people decided to take the "facts" seriously. https://github.com/LRitzdorf/TheJeffDeanFacts