Paul Halmos News Today

Calling himself a mathematician who did law in his spare time, he had a passion for public-interest law, which led to appearances at inquests into police shootings of Black men and at high-profile inquiries

The Martians of Budapest”, sometimes referred to as simply “The Martians” is a colloquial term used to describe a group of prominent Hungarian physicists and mathematicians who emigrated to the United States following the Great Purge of 1933. The term refers to—what appeared, from the perspective of Americans—to be a group of men with superhuman intellects, arriving from an obscure country speaking an incomprehensible foreign language and English with strong, characteristic accents (la...

Cantors Paradise “Most mathematicians prove what they can, von Neumann proves what he wants” Share If you enjoy this newsletter, please consider supporting future issues by signing up for a paid subscription at $5 per month, which also gives you access to all previous issues. Thanks! It is indeed supremely difficult to effectively refute the claim that John von Neumann is likely the most intelligent person who has ever lived. By the time of his death in 1957 at the modest age of 53, the H...