"He was brilliant, spoke very fast, his English was quite fluent, he made remarkably few errors. A characteristic one was to talk about “infinite serious” for infinite series. No one ventured to correct his few lapses. I had met him recently at a party. The high point of the evening was a recitation race between him and Norbert Wiener. Somehow, someone recited a line from Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark.” Norbert, with his usual ebullience and sonorous voice, began reciting from line 1. Johnny started off in pursuit. Norbert accelerated, but Johnny came up even. We held our breaths as the lines poured out, on and on until they reached the end in a dead heat."
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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
Edgar Raymond Lorch, in Szeged in 1934 (edited by Reuben Hersh)
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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