The Vox Day / Ron Unz side of the 'web likes to discredit Albert Einstein by pointing out that he'd stood on some shoulders. I always felt this was misguided. Now Erik Hoel is pointing to, perhaps, a more deserving target: John von Neumann.
Von Neumann was an also-ran in my 1980s-90s education. The Curies, Bohr, Rutherford, and of course Newton and Einstein get the top billing. Turing and maybe Dijkstra, for computer nerds. It's recently we've been hearing of von Neumann again. Maybe in the same way we've been reviving Hamilton's quaternion: because computers are just so much more important to us today.
Hoel seems to endorse The Man From The Future, in an otherwise-skeptical summary, so I'll take that as the book worth reading on JvN. A book I suspect I'd read first is Hoel's own proposal on aristocratic tutoring. With the caveat that TGGP and others have had comments deleted by Hoel; so, Hoel might not be getting the input he needs from his reviewers.
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