"Under the force of Courant's plea, Trowbridge reconsidered Hilbert's request; and in the fall of 1926 von Neumann came to Göttingen as a Rockefeller Fellow. The young mathematicians there recognized that he was obviously a prodigy, but some were suspicious of what they saw as a certain “glibness” about him. They also found his mathematics “too abstract” for their taste. “We were wrong about that,” confessed Friedrichs, part of whose later work was to be strongly influenced by the work of von Neumann."
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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
Constance Reid, in Courant in Göttingen and New York. The Story of an Improbable Mathematician (1976), p. 112
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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