linguistic:translation
Child prodigy

Von Neumann was a child prodigy who at six years old could divide two eight-digit numbers in his head and converse in Ancient Greek. He, his brothers and his cousins were instructed by governesses. Von Neumann's father believed that knowledge of languages other than their native Hungarian was essential, so the children were tutored in English, French, German and Italian. By age eight, von Neumann was familiar with differential and integral calculus, and by twelve he had read Borel's La Théorie des Fonctions. He was also interested in history, reading Wilhelm Oncken 's 46-volume world history series Allgemeine Geschichte in Einzeldarstellungen (General History in Monographs). One of the rooms in the apartment was converted into a library and reading room.

Von Neumann entered the Lutheran Fasori Evangélikus Gimnázium in 1914. Eugene Wigner was a year ahead of von Neumann at the school and soon became his friend.

Although von Neumann's father insisted that he attend school at the grade level appropriate to his age, he agreed to hire private tutors to give von Neumann advanced instruction. At 15, he began to study advanced calculus under the analyst Gábor Szegő. By 19, von Neumann had published two major mathematical papers, the second of which gave the modern definition of ordinal numbers, which superseded Georg Cantor 's definition. At the conclusion of his education at the gymnasium, he applied for and won the Eötvös Prize, a national award for mathematics.