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.