There is a wealth of stories about young von Neumann’s prodigal genius, some of them probably true. At age six, it was later said, he would joke with his father in classical Greek, and he could divide two eight-digit numbers in his head. As a party trick, he would memorize a page of the phone book and recite back the names and numbers, and he could recall verbatim pages from novels or articles he had read, in any of five languages. “If a mentally superhuman race ever develops,” the hydrogen bomb developer Edward Teller once said, “its members will resemble Johnny von Neumann.”
