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by regularfry 599 days ago
There's a parallel there to Feynman, if you squint a bit. He seems to have been synaesthetic in a way that let him use the sensory part of his brain as a maths coprocessor, and he didn't understand it himself.
1 comments

Feymann seems more understandable. He wanted to understand everything from first principles and derive it all himself, and spent a lifetime doing so, building himself up. He developed a huge repertoire of insights and mathematical tricks/approaches that could be brought to bear on whatever he put his mind to... It seems like he trained his mind to become what it was. The end result was of course incredible, and he would instantly or within hours see solutions to problems that colleagues had been stuck on for months.

Feynmann, like von Neumann, also seems more approachable/understandable in that he wasn't just operating at genius level, but was also a regular fun loving guy (strip clubs, bongo drums, safe hacking and all). Von Neumann and some of his Hungarian peers were famously referred to as "The Martians", but it's really Ramanujan who seems like the alien.