The Duties of John von Neumann’s Assistant in the 1930s (2020) (opens in new tab)

Understanding is not binary. They mean that the bright student walked away understanding X% (maybe 70%) of the major logical steps Von Neumann made.

Those students could then go home, open a book or the transcript of his lectures and spend 5-10 hours figuring out all the details, and exploring auxiliary stuff not covered in the lecture.

Lecture time is fixed, outside-lecture time is 10X lecture time.

Perhaps the requirement of giving a lecture helped him prepare knowledge in a communicable way. For me, when I'm asked to give a panel talk or prepare a presentation, I'm forced suddenly to better communicate that I otherwise might need to, and thus knowledge is stored in a better way.

There are a few famous instances where mathematicians ran seminars for close to a decade and developed extensive theories on that way. Von Neumann appears to have been one, Grothendieck is a famous other example. The lectures are basically then meant to be taken by people that dedicate almost all their time to understand them.

In other words they are lecturing as they are developing the new theory. Clearly such things probably happen much less often now a days, because the overall research landscape is such, that this is not really rewarded. On a smaller scale research seminars in mathematics still are like that though, the results discussed there are often only circulated among the participants, which then make them available to the public piece by piece. Peter Scholzes breakthroughs were widely discussed in Bonn long before they were accessible to the overall public and even then most of what was taught in the initial seminars in Bonn wasn't circulated.

Not commenting about this specific case, but I know some people just like to feed their ego, by lecturing so "high" no one can understand them, so they reinforce their believe, that they themself are clearly the most intelligent person around.

In some cases it might be due to the curse of knowledge. You assume because you understand it that the subject must be pretty simple for others.

The problem with educators in general is that they tend to design lectures as a transition from one set of information to another set of information.

In contrast, what students actually need is to transition from one state of mind to another state of mind.

Thankfully one language (English, but whatever language it is might not be that relevant) is becoming 'de facto' the language for sciences, and kids are starting to learn it from an earlier age.

It's still a long way to go, especially for undeveloped countries. However, probably any children born within the next decade will be able to read and speak at least advanced English before reaching 18.

The incredible success of a small group of Hungarians from one region and time has sometimes been attributed to the unique social situation in Hungary then. Part of which was linguistic. In the case of the Hungarian Jews, they were usually Hungarian speaking at home, and often from families of German or Yiddish-speaking background further back. Usually educated in German. Some were educated in Hebrew at religious school. In the case of Hebrew, Hungarian and German, that's three radically different languages, about as unalike as three languages can be. Maybe that has an effect on the mind?

Though as I recall, von Neumann's family was non-observing. So he was fluent in Ancient Greek by the age of 5, instead. So I'm not that strongly wedded to the hypothesis. Maybe they really were from Mars, as Leo Szilard once quipped.

> I write English with greater fluency than my native language at this point, but reaching this level took thousands of hours that could have been spent solving problems and building things.

There was the idea of Esperanto as everyone's second language, so that everyone could talk to everyone with 1/10 of the effort most people now spend learning English, but... it worked about as well as trying to convince people to leave Facebook while everyone else is there.

I had the impression that the assistant's proposed task was to translate von Neumann's older papers, the ones he wrote in German before moving to the US. In either case, he was fluent in German from childhood, but his English was not all that great at the time he moved (it got better with time). His native language was of course Hungarian.

For some reason, viewing it on incognito mode simply gives the text without the gateway.

Just delete their cookies to work around this. But I agree I don't like medium either the site is very slow and the extra steps necessary to access the content are very annoying.

Just turn off javascript.

It's astonishing how much of the web suddenly becomes less broken when you do that...

What's puzzling, really? Prior to WWII, the USA were hardly a "beacon of knowledge". They were still a young country and most scientific advancements originated from Europe.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26840948

The article mentions Baltimore in particular, which may have had something to do with it (Johns Hopkins notwithstanding).

[noun]-er as in [noun]-person, like butler, computer, farmer, etc. The device in front of you is _electronic_ computer as called in the era it had been written in.

Source?