It's like that all the way through undergrad, you're just learning things that have been known for a long time. You need to know the basics before you can contr

It's like that all the way through undergrad, you're just learning things that have been known for a long time. You need to know the basics before you can contribute anything new, and there's a lot of basics nowadays. Once you get to the edge, the game changes a fair bit. You'll need to know the actual experts, rather than just watching YouTube lectures or reading textbooks. In terms of difference at the level you're talking about, the one big difference is that von Neumann's parents recognized how smart he was, and could afford to hire appropriate tutors to accelerate his learning. There's this thing called Bloom's Two Sigma, though I'm no expert on the area it would appear that having a tutor improves results considerably. Now imagine one of the smartest kids ever born having parents who got him tutors.