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I think you are confusing von Neumann with someone else, because that is not the case, at all. He grew up in a wealthy family which was ennobled by the emperor
by bidirectional 6y ago
I think you are confusing von Neumann with someone else, because that is not the case, at all. He grew up in a wealthy family which was ennobled by the emperor when he was 10 (hence the von), and spoke Hungarian natively. In childhood he was taught by governesses in numerous major European languages before going to a Christian school for the Hungarian elite, while receiving private tutoring from a renowned mathematician. Then he went to prestigious universities in Germany and Switzerland, before becoming the youngest Privatdozent in University of Berlin history.
The situation obviously rapidly changed in Europe, but Von Neumann left for Princeton before the 30s began. He grew up in a life of great privilege.
- yosito 6y agoAs I said "I can't accurately recount the facts", but Hungary was definitely not a country of privilege at really any time in it's history, much less the late 1800s and the early 1900s. The facts of Neumann's own life may have been much more fortunate than his country of birth. That is something I don't know much about. But I would imagine, no matter how privileged his life was, the fact that he was born in a country that was oppressed by a foreign superpower, lived through a holocaust of his ethnic group, and spoke Hungarian as his first language in a world dominated by German and English, shaped who he was.