John von Neumann

John von Neumann the Hungarian-American mathematician (1903-1957) of extraordinary range, whose work shaped quantum mechanics, game theory, functional analysis and the design of the modern computer. He devised the stored-program architecture that bears his name, contributed to the Manhattan Project, and became one of the most influential scientists of the twentieth century.

Early Life and Education

John von Neumann was born on 28 December 1903 in Budapest, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into a wealthy and cultured Jewish family; his father had been ennobled, and the family name became margittai Neumann Janos. He was a child prodigy with a phenomenal memory and an astonishing capacity for mental calculation, able to divide eight-digit numbers in his head as a small boy. He was tutored privately and published his first mathematical paper at seventeen.

He studied simultaneously at the University of Berlin and at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, receiving a diploma in chemical engineering in 1925 and a doctorate in mathematics from Budapest in 1926. He lectured at Berlin and Hamburg before emigrating to the United States in 1930, and he joined the faculty of Princeton University, where he became one of the original professors of the Institute for Advanced Study when it was founded in 1933.

Pure Mathematics and Quantum Theory

By his late twenties von Neumann had already made fundamental contributions to several branches of mathematics. He gave a rigorous axiomatic foundation to set theory and to the theory of operators on Hilbert space, work that became a cornerstone of functional analysis and of quantum mechanics. His mathematical formulation of quantum theory, published in the 1930s, remains a standard treatment of the subject and clarified the statistics of measurement.

He also proved fundamental results in measure theory, in lattice theory, and in the theory of operator algebras, which are now named von Neumann algebras. He contributed to the theory of continuous geometry and to ergodic theory. Even without his later applied work, these achievements would place him among the leading mathematicians of his generation, and they testify to the breadth of his abstract interests.

Game Theory and Economics

In 1928 von Neumann proved the minimax theorem for two-person zero-sum games, showing that such games have optimal strategies for both players. With the economist Oskar Morgenstern he expanded this into the book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, published in 1944, which founded game theory as a discipline and proposed it as a foundation for economics. The work introduced concepts and methods that transformed the study of strategic interaction.

Game theory became a powerful tool not only in economics but in political science, biology, operations research and computer science, and the minimax idea influenced the design of algorithms and of strategies for decision-making under uncertainty. Von Neumann continued to work on game theory and on related problems of decision and utility, and his approach gave social science a mathematical language for conflict and cooperation. His contributions in this field earned him a lasting reputation in economics.

Computing and the Stored-Program Architecture

During and after the Second World War von Neumann became deeply involved in computation. He worked at the Los Alamos laboratory on the Manhattan Project, where the demands of calculating explosive hydrodynamics made high-speed computing essential. In 1945 he circulated a report on the design of an electronic computer, the EDVAC, which described a machine that would store both its data and its instructions in the same rewritable memory.

This stored-program concept allowed a computer to be reprogrammed without rewiring, and it became the basis of nearly all subsequent digital computers, an arrangement known as the von Neumann architecture. He worked to build machines at the Institute for Advanced Study and advised on the design of others, and he developed methods for numerical computation, including the Monte Carlo method for simulating probabilistic problems. His presence turned computing from an engineering curiosity into a major scientific enterprise.

Wartime Service, Government and Legacy

Von Neumann served as a consultant to many government and military bodies, including the Atomic Energy Commission, and he worked on problems of nuclear weapons design and on the theory of deterrence, later contributing to the strategic doctrine of the Cold War. He also studied automata theory and self-reproducing machines, comparing the logic of computing with the operation of biological systems, and he helped to lay groundwork for artificial intelligence.

He received many honours, including the Enrico Fermi Award, and he was a member of the national academies and of numerous learned societies. He died on 8 February 1957 in Washington, D.C., of cancer, at the age of fifty-three, and his death was widely mourned as the loss of a singular intellect. His name endures in the architecture of almost every modern computer.

See also

• Von Neumann architecture
• Game theory
• Monte Carlo method
• Institute for Advanced Study