Apparently he liked to play German marching bands at top volume while he worked in his office at the Institute for Advanced Studies, which greatly annoyed his neighbor Einstein.

highly recommend reading: Turings Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson[0]

it covers von Nuemann’s time developing the IAS machine at Princeton.

[0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/44425/turings-cathe...

The end of life section is a bit whitewashed. Freeman Dyson had an article (struggling to find it) about how von Neumann was invited to give a Hilbert-style lecture on the 10 problems for the new computing age. All the big names at the time were there, but von Neumann was in such poor shape (dementia I assume), that it was decided to pretend it had never happened.

edit: article is called Birds and Frogs, by Freeman Dyson https://wucj.lab.westlake.edu.cn/Others/Dyson_Birds_and_Frog...

To whoever speaks German or can stand auto subtitles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH2ZVSDYgK0

Anyone interested in von Newmann should read The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut

This seems relevant to the current debate on the role of AI in mathematics:

What made von Neumann great? Was it the extraordinary rapidity with which he could understand and think and the unusual memory that retained everything he had once thought through? No. These qualities, however impressive they might have been, are ephemeral; they will have no more effect on the mathematics and the mathematicians of the future than the prowess of an athlete of a hundred years ago has on the sport of today.

"The duties of John von Neumann's assistant" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16411799

I don't know what ww4 will be fought with... But ww3 will be fought With mat4x4<f32> And 2.4 GHz

Authored by Paul Halmos. He wrote Finite-Dimensional Vector Spaces, which was assigned textbook for my Linear Algebra course. A humbling read for me, coming from calc 3 and thinking I was hot shit. Stripped me of any illusions of becoming a mathematician.

von Neumann is one of the very very few people that I struggle to place in any single template. From all the facts already present in the pdf and elsewhere, it does become immediately obvious that he had both superhuman memory and an extremely fast processor (although it is unclear if his brain followed a von Neumann architecture).

My template had guessed,

"sounds like someone who enjoyed working in quiet spaces" -> Nope, he liked loud environments to get his brain going (apparently Einstein once complained about Neumann being noisy)

"he would have been a focused person" -> Nope, he never worked on anything for too long

"unlikely to be motivated by money" -> Nope, he famously “loved money” according to Wigner [1]

"probably not someone who stares at women" -> nope, at Los Alamos, secretaries sometimes put cardboard across the open fronts of their desks because otherwise Neumann would stare

Tl;Dr: I find him fascinating.

[1]: interestingly, there was a group of Jewish Hungarian scientists - von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, and Theodore von Karman - all brilliant, all born within one-mile-radius circle in downtown Budapest, all emigrated to the US, collectively known as Martians by their colleagues.