“It is exceptional that one should be able to acquire the understanding of a process without having previously acquired a deep familiarity with running it, with using it, before one has assimilated it in an instinctive and empirical way… Thus any discussion of the nature of intellectual effort in any field is difficult, unless it presupposes an easy, routine familiarity with that field. In mathematics this limitation becomes very severe.”

—  John Von Neumann

As quoted in "The Mathematician" in The World of Mathematics (1956), by James Roy Newman

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John Von Neumann19
Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath 1903–1957

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