"At the age of 6 he was able to divide two eight-digit numbers in his head. By the age of 8 he had mastered college calculus and as a trick could memorize on sight a column in a telephone book and repeat back the names, addresses and numbers. History was only a “hobby,” but by the outbreak of World War I, when he was 10, his photographic mind had absorbed most of the contents of the 46-volume works edited by the German historian Oncken with a sophistication that startled his elders."
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PolymathsAcademics from the United StatesMathematicians from the United StatesAcademics from HungaryMathematicians from Hungary
Original Language: English
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Sources
Clay Blair Jr., in Passing of a Great Mind: John von Neumann, a Brilliant, Jovial Mathematician, was a Prodigious Servant of Science and his Country (25 February 1957)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann
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John von Neumann
John von Neumann (28 December 1903 – 8 February 1957) was a Hungarian-American-Jewish mathematician, physicist, inventor, computer scientist, and polymath. He made major contributions to a number of fields, including mathematics (foundations of mathematics, functional analysis, ergodic theory, geometry, set theory, topology, and numerical analysis), physics (quantum mechanics, hydrodynamics and quantum statistical mechanics), economics (game theory), computing (Von Neumann architecture, linear p
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