"He stimulated people everywhere. Von Neumann was generous intellectually, because his resources were so enormous, that he never gave away anything that he couldn't do without. He was a fountainhead of information, and he didn't hold back because there was always much more in depth than he ever exposed at one time. I'm not exaggerating. This was indeed how he was. In the few decades that followed, I have had the experience of understanding what this was like, by working as a consultant for some groups who were at a technical level so far below what I knew myself, that what they felt was worth bickering about was in fact possible [?] that one could ignore it, because one knows one has much more in depth than that and that's not an important point. Let them bicker about it, or let them think that they did something great. He was precisely that way. He was in depth, more knowledgeable than any man, and I say this having worked with Wiener for four years, and Wiener was no slouch himself. Von Neumann was a giant. He was ahead of anybody."
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PolymathsAcademics from the United StatesMathematicians from the United StatesAcademics from HungaryMathematicians from Hungary
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Julian Bigelow, in an interview with Richard R. Mertz, January 20, 1971
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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