John von Neumann

Their life

The fastest mind of his century: axiomatized quantum mechanics, invented game theory, designed the stored-program computer architecture every device still uses, and did it all while being famously good company.

Known for

• Axiomatizing quantum mechanics
• Game theory and the minimax theorem
• Manhattan Project implosion design
• Stored-program computer architecture
• Cellular automata and self-replication
• Von Neumann ordinals in set theory

The road they walked

John von Neumann was born Neumann János in Budapest in 1903, the eldest son of a Jewish banking family wealthy and cultured enough to buy their children private tutors and, eventually, a title of nobility. He could divide eight-digit numbers in his head by age six and had absorbed a forty-volume history of the world by his teens; his father, wary of mathematics as a livelihood, pushed him toward chemical engineering, so von Neumann studied it dutifully in Berlin and Zurich while simultaneously, almost as a side project, earning a doctorate in mathematics from Budapest in 1926 for work that helped put set theory on rigorous axiomatic footing.

He came of age in an extraordinary hothouse — Budapest's early-20th-century Jewish intelligentsia, which also produced Wigner, Szilard, and Teller — and then moved through the era's great mathematical capitals, working alongside Hilbert at Göttingen before the rise of Nazism made Central Europe unlivable for a man of his background. He settled at Princeton's newly founded Institute for Advanced Study in 1933, one of its original six professors alongside Einstein, and became an American citizen in 1937. It was there, and later as a government consultant, that his gifts turned from pure abstraction toward the urgent problems of the age.

The hinge of his career was the Manhattan Project. Recruited to work out the physics of implosion for the plutonium bomb, von Neumann found the calculations for shock waves and explosive lenses too vast for existing methods, and that bottleneck pushed him toward electronic computing. His 1945 'First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC' laid out the stored-program architecture — instructions and data held in the same memory — that became the blueprint for nearly every computer built since. He spent his final years advising the government on nuclear strategy and computing as a commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission, still working at the furious, convivial pace that had made him legendary among colleagues who could rarely keep up.

How their story ended

Von Neumann was diagnosed with cancer in 1955 — possibly bone, possibly pancreatic in origin, and possibly linked to radiation exposure from his work on nuclear tests, though historians disagree on the exact cause. He continued working from a wheelchair and, confined to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., was received into the Catholic Church shortly before the end, having sought out a priest in his final weeks. He died on February 8, 1957, at age fifty-three, still one of the government's most sought-after scientific minds even as his body failed him.

In their words

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Tables where John sits

The Machine Room

For computing’s founders — from the first program to the last bit.

From the Journal