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
There 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.
It's also possible that the greatest minds of our time aren't engaged in furthering our understanding of the universe, but instead devising more efficient ways of displaying internet advertising or faster stock trading algorithms.
The silver lining is that many of these companies publicly release their research. i.e. Rob Pike and Ken Thompson may be working on advertising, but we can still benefit from Golang.
I 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?
I'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.
It 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."
Sadly, 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.
Both 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.
> 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.
While 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)
If we're talking about von Neumann, or even just the math olympiad, then clearly we're not talking about how well the education system serves the 50th percentile. It's possible for a system to be awful for most, and somehow find and train the top few percent brilliantly.
Mathematics 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.
> 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...
The city Lwów, or Lviv as Ukrainians now call it, had a great school and the city changed hands during war.
Also, Polish mathematicians from other universities played an important part in breaking the Enigma. They developed the Bombe, the cryptographic machine later sent to UK, which was then refined and used to break it.
More generally, I suspect it was something about the era and its culture that valued intellect and sciences. These days people like that are often put down as nerds. Leaders and extraverts are praised and set as examples. Celebrities are also a modern invention, I see them as something quite distinct from "stars". The only requirement to be a celebrity is to be popular.
Also, these days people would rather worship CEOs.
I 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.
Elon 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.
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.
