6 ms·
von Neumann, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Einstein, Rutherford, Turing, Teller, Szilard, Wigner, Meitner... the list goes on... -- how did that time produce so many peop
by yannis7 7y ago
von Neumann, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Einstein, Rutherford, Turing, Teller, Szilard, Wigner, Meitner... the list goes on... -- how did that time produce so many people of colossal intellect?
War certainly can't be the primary factor, given that many of them were brilliant/productive even before WWI
- 0-_-0 7y ago4 on your list are Hungarian, and 3 of them went to the same high school: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasori_Gimn%C3%A1zium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasori_Gimn%C3%A1zium Hungary had a great education system at the time.
- qnsi 7y agoOr great genes
- jjgreen 7y agoOr there's some kind of magical properties of paprika that the rest of the world hasn't yet noticed ...
- chx 7y ago> Hungary had a great education system at the time. I seriously doubt you could back this. You are generalizing from a single school. Might as well argue that socialist Hungary had a great education system because of Fazekas. Neither are true. I happen to have a maths teacher degree from a Hungarian university and we studied Hungarian education history and I learned much more about education systems later on my own (and this is not to say this university maths teacher course was a good one, quite the opposite). If you want to know what great education at the time looked like, read up on Summerhill -- it was founded in 1921 but humanistic education has been around for centuries.
- nabla9 7y agoMathematics culture and mathematical pedagogy in Hungary has legendary reputation. I don't know how their system works now,but at least up to 80s or 90s it was seen as being the highest level. It emphasized creativity, communication and problem solving. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-28582-5_5 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-28582-5_...
- chx 7y ago> but at least up to 80s or 90s it was seen as being the highest level. It emphasized creativity, communication and problem solving. What utter baloney! There were a few, very few special math classes that went against the system which delivered results. I went to one, I should know...
- 0-_-0 7y agoWhile having a much smaller population (10M), Hungary places 4th in worldwide medal rankings on the International Mathematics Olympiad [1] behind China (1.5B), USA (300M) and Russia (150M) [1]: https://www.imo-official.org/results_country.aspx?column=awards&order=desc https://www.imo-official.org/results_country.aspx?column=awa...
- SamReidHughes 7y agoWell, that's historical. In 2019 it was 1. China 1. USA 3. S. Korea (51M) 4. N. Korea (25M). And Hungary lost to Serbia (7M). https://www.imo-official.org/year_country_r.aspx?year=2019&column=total&order=desc https://www.imo-official.org/year_country_r.aspx?year=2019&c...
- chx 7y agoThere were a few, very few special math classes that went against the system which delivered results. I went to one, I should know...
- iguy 7y ago
- tiborsaas 7y agoSadly, not anymore. The government is doing everything to dumb down education and research in academia. It's really pathetic. We are doomed for generations thanks to this. Just a recent example: a Prezi.com founder decided to create an alternative private school to show and lead by example. They didn't get the accreditation this year. If you stick out, they shut you down.
- madhadron 7y agoIt hasn't had that education system since World War II.
- bobcostas55 7y agoSSC had a great post on that: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...
- idoh 7y agoI read that post, "great" is an understatement. Thanks for sharing!
- hyperpallium 7y agoWhat made the school great? Was it brilliant teachers, or some replicable system? I have a theory that maths being taught as a skill, instead of an intuitive system, derivable from axioms as with Euclid may a cause.
- 0-_-0 7y agoLászló Rátz taught math to both Neumann and Wigner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_R%C3%A1tz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_R%C3%A1tz
- mcv 7y agoBoth quality education and an appreciation for science and intellectual achievements in general, could easily be a big factor. These days, scientists, journalists and other truth-seeking professions are often criticised and discredited because the facts they find are politically inconvenient (global warming, anyone?). Education is often seen primarily as an expense, rather than an investment. People admire pop stars more than scientists. Truth is apparently whatever you strongly believe it to be, these days. It doesn't surprise me at all that the current political climate is not great for fostering great minds.
- ksec 7y agoI have had the same question in my mind for a long time. My preliminary answer is TV or entertainment, in those days there were much much less distraction.
- sea-shore 7y agoOh... :(
- josh_fyi 7y agoSlateStarCodex "The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project" https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...
- dmazin 7y agoThere is no reason to think we are no longer producing people with colossal intellect. They are probably now collaborators on a large project, since that is what math and science have become. Plus we haven’t had enough time to make myths about the recent times. Of course the 20th century was incredible for physics, but we don’t know yet what will make the recent years special. We may, for example, in 80 years wonder about how it was that the early 21st century produced so many ambitious, large-scale experiments.
- criddell 7y agoI have no idea about the state of modern mathematics but I wouldn't have guessed that the idea of a lone mathematician has passed. What are the big projects in mathematics?
- whatshisface 7y agoIt would take people like us (anyone who doesn't already know the big projects in math are) years of study to resolve that list in to anything more than names. However if you're looking for a modern math celebrity I'd volunteer Terrence Tao. Although only a mathematician could understand what he's working on it's clear from how he's talked about that in eighty years people will be saying, "I wonder if there will be any people like Tao in my lifetime." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao
- KingFelix 7y agoRoger Penrose is still around
- joe_the_user 7y agoI'm not sure if it's necessarily big projects but the proving difficult theorems today has often involved the construction of huge "machinery", whole branch of math, that then get applied to simple-to-state-but-difficult-to-prove theorems, the example being Wiles using modular form theories to prove Fermet's last theorem. And this situation comes because all (or the great majority) of the easy theorems have been proved for most established branches of math. This also means great discoveries are coming at a later age for mathematicians, as simply getting up to speed in complex fields takes years. All of this implies it would be hard to have another Von Neumann today.
- rpmisms 7y agoElon Musk will be this generations' Edison. Some current nobody in ML or AI research will be the Turing of our time. They're here, we just don't know it yet.
- F-0X 7y ago>Elon Musk will be this generations' Edison. I hope you mean this in the literal sense, in that they are both people who have taken the scientific contributions of others for their own businesses, and somehow get the credit for work they never did.
- rpmisms 7y agoYes, I would have said Tesla if he was the Tesla of our generation. I'm not an Edison fan, but I appreciate the work he did for society.
- sol_remmy2 7y agoHow could you forget von Braun?
- 6d6b73 7y agoThat war criminal? The sooner we forget about him the better.
- jamesdmiller 7y agoWe must never forget him so we keep in mind that genius can be used in support of evil.
- cgh 7y agoDon't forget Paul Dirac, a true intellectual contemporary of von Neumann.
- js8 7y ago> how did that time produce so many people of colossal intellect? We have since invented TV, computer games, quantitative finance and web frameworks. All these things cause massive brain drain.
- molotovbliss 7y agoClaude Shannon I'd include with Alan Turing & von Neumann. All 3 on top of the list of fathered ideas behind modern technology. IMO.