Astral Codex Ten

Teller

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Teller

Article

Teller is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 13, 2022 and September 03, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “fellow Manhattan Project physicists Wigner and Teller”; “Says his friend/rival Teller”; ““Teller and von Neumann made the H-bomb.”“. It most often appears alongside Hitler, Holocaust, Leo Szilard.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: July 13, 2022
  • Last seen: September 03, 2024

Appears In

None.

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: The Man From The Future
July 13, 2022 · Original source
At age 11, John went to high school at Budapest’s Fasori Gymnasium. This school has since attracted historical attention for the number of geniuses it produced; along with von Neumann and fellow Manhattan Project physicists Wigner and Teller, its alumni included Nobel-winning economist John Harsanyi and poet George Faludy. The faculty, too, were top-notch: young John’s math teacher was Laszlo Ratz, later to be memorialized by the Laszlo Ratz Prize given yearly for excellence in math education. But despite this enviable environment, it is unclear how much attention John ever paid in school. His brother writes about “frequent complaints of his high school teachers to the effect that when he was asked what the assignment was for today, he did not know; but he then participated in discussions with full competence and knowledge of the subject." Even Ratz was not fully confident in his ability to teach von Neumann, and eventually recommended a private tutor (according to MacRae, the tutor - Gabor Szego - would later become “one of the half dozen most distinguished Hungarian mathematicians of the twentieth century” and end up as chairman of the math department at Stanford).
And he was especially good with children, for whom he had seemingly unlimited patience. Edward Teller wrote that "Von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us.“
The only time in The Man From The Future where I felt like I got a real glimpse of this was near the end, when Edward Teller was eulogizing his sometimes friend, sometimes rival. He said:
Interview Day At Thiel Capital
September 03, 2024 · Original source
“All the good superweapons are invented by Jews. Einstein and Oppenheimer made the A-bomb. Teller and von Neumann made the H-bomb. Samuel Cohen made the neutron bomb, Leo Szilard made the cobalt bomb, et cetera. Even the world-destroying AIs are being invented by Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, et cetera.”