John von Neumann (1903-1957)
John von Neumann (December 28, 1903 February 8, 1957) was a Jewish Hungarian-born mathematician and polymath who made significant contributions in quantum physics, practical analysis, set theory, computer science, economics and many other mathematical disciplines. Most notably, von Neumann was an innovator of the contemporary digital computer and the application of operator theory to quantum mechanics.
Born in Budapest, von Neumann was a child prodigy who moved on to study chemistry in Berlin and Zurich, where he attained a Diploma in Chemical Engineering in 1926. He earned his doctorate in Mathematics on Set Theory from the University of Budapest later that same year. After lecturing at Berlin and Hamburg, von Neumann emigrated to the US in 1930 where he did work at Princeton and was among the founding members of the Institute for Advanced Studies.
In the mid-1920s formalization was all the fury in mathematics, and quantum mechanics was all the craze in physics. And in 1927 von Neumann set out to add these together -- by axiomatizing quantum mechanics. Despite von Neumann's early interest in logic and the originations of math, he (like most of the math profession) departed from this by the mid-1930s. In Cambridge and then in Princeton he came across the young Alan Turing -- even providing him a job as an assistant in 1938. But he plainly paid little attention to Turing's classic 1936 report on Turing machines and the concept of universal computation, writing in a recommendation letter on June 1, 1937 that "[Turing] has done good work on ... theory of almost periodic functions and theory of continuous groups".
At Princeton, von Neumann lectured in the emerging area of quantum theory and through his work with rings of operators (later renamed Neumann algebras) he helped formulate the mathematical bases of that theory which were revealed in the paper "Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik" (1932). His original publishing on game theory, "Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour" was printed in 1934 with co-author Oskar Morgenstern.
Spurred by an interest in hydrodynamics and the trouble of solving the non-linear incomplete derivative equations involved, von Neumann addressed the rising field of computing. His first introduction to computers was Howard Aiken's Harvard Mark I. Von Neumann, an aspiring and gifted mathematician, had heard of the ENIAC project in August, 1944, during a chance conversation with Herman Goldstine while awaiting a train. Von Neumann had been working on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb, and immediately recognized that an electronic computer could help work through the necessary calculations.
By November, he joined the Eckert / Mauchly team, who had already begun development of the stored program computer.As a consultant to Eckert and Mauchly on the ENIAC, he formulated a concept for computer architecture that stays with us to this day. Known later on as the "von Neumann architecture", the stored-program computer (where both the operating instructions and the data they operate upon live together in memory) with its central controller, I/O, and computer memory was outlined in a "Draft Report" and paved the direction for the modern-day era of computing. He also formed the concept of "MAD" (Mutually assured destruction), which ruled American Nuclear Strategy in the post-war era.
The conceptual model of EDVAC was fully in position by 1946, but delays caused by the conclusion of the war and the exit of workers for civilian jobs held up its completion until 1952. While Mauchly, Eckert, and Von Neumann all added to its success, Von Neumann's 1945, blueprint outlining the principles behind the stored-program computer earned him a majority of the credit for developing the new advance. The 23-page document,typed and composed by Von Neumann in 1945, was meant to demonstrate the potential of the EDVAC design. It took as its job a very basic role, sorting, rearranging and combining data. Possibly it can be said that with this small program, Von Neumann rearranged the past, merging it with the future.
Von Neumann invented the von Neumann architecture in use in all non-parallel-processing computers. Just about every commercially useable home computer, microcomputer and supercomputer is a von Neumann machine. John von Neumann was the scientist who conceived a basic idea that serves all modern computers - that a computer's program and the information that it processes do not have to be fed into the computer as it is running, but can be saved in the computer's memory - a belief generally referred to as the stored-program computer . In his short life, von Neumann became among the most applauded and proclaimed scientists of the 20th century. He left an unerasable mark on the disciplines of mathematics, quantum theory, game theory, nuclear physics, and computer science.
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