John von Neumann
John von Neumann (28 December 1903 – 8 February 1957) — born Neumann János Lajos in Budapest — was a Hungarian-American mathematician whose fingerprints are on more fields than perhaps any other scientist of the twentieth century: set theory, quantum mechanics, game theory, economics, nuclear weapons, and the architecture of the modern computer. The von Neumann architecture — memory, processor, stored program — is named for him, and the EDVAC report he wrote in 1945 defined what a computer is.
The prodigy
Von Neumann was a legend from childhood — by six he could divide eight-digit numbers in his head; by eight he knew calculus. He took degrees simultaneously in mathematics (Budapest, 1926) and chemical engineering (ETH Zurich), moved to Germany, and at twenty-two published the mathematical foundation of quantum mechanics still taught today — turning the new physics from a pile of rules into a rigorous theory. He emigrated to Princeton in 1930, joined the Institute for Advanced Study at Einstein's invitation, and became an American citizen in 1937.
The war
During the Second World War von Neumann became indispensable to the Manhattan Project — his work on implosion dynamics shaped the Trinity and Nagasaki weapons — and was present at the target selection meetings that chose the Japanese cities. He later said, without obvious regret, that he had simply done the mathematics put in front of him. The wartime work led directly to his computing involvement: the H-bomb's physics demanded calculations no existing machine could do, so von Neumann went looking for computers and found the Moore School's ENIAC project — and the six women programming it, whom he reportedly visited and worked alongside.
The computer
Von Neumann joined the Moore School group as a consultant in 1944, absorbing the designs Eckert and Mauchly were developing for the machine that would follow ENIAC — EDVAC. In June 1945 he wrote it all up: the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC — the first published description of a stored-program computer, and the document that fixed the architecture (memory, central arithmetic unit, control, I/O) in everyone's minds. Whether he invented the stored program or was the one who wrote it down is computing's oldest argument — Eckert and Mauchly always maintained it was theirs; history gave the name to von Neumann anyway.
He went on to design the IAS machine at Princeton (1952) — the machine every early computer copied — and the architecture is called von Neumann architecture to this day, even though its single-bus bottleneck is now called the von Neumann bottleneck that modern processors work around. His name also lives in the von Neumann probe (self-replicating machines), von Neumann algebra (the mathematics of operator rings), and half a dozen other concepts in different sciences.
Legacy
- The architecture: memory + processor + stored program, named for him whether or not he invented it
- The EDVAC report that defined it — and the priority dispute that made enemies of the men who worked on it
- The Turing Award's most-cited intellectual ancestor, and the model of the scientist-as-technologist: he treated computing as a branch of mathematics, and was right
- Died of cancer at 53 — still consulting for the government, still working, in Washington, where they buried him in a coffin his colleagues filled with a football, a chess piece, and a bottle of whisky
See also
References
- von Neumann, John. "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" (Moore School, 1945).
- Aspray, William. John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing (MIT Press, 1990).
- Goldstine, Herman H. The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann (Princeton UP, 1972).