John Von Neumann, 1903-1957

John Von Neumann was a world-famous mathematician who contributed enormously to the fields of computer science, game theory and theoretical physics. He was a professor at both the University and the Institute for Advanced Study.

John von Neumann was born Neumann János Lajos in Budapest, Hungary, to a wealthy Jewish family. In Hungary the family name comes first. His father, Miksa (Max), was a bank lawyer whose ancestors had originally immigrated to Hungary from Russia.

János was a prodigy who showed aptitudes for languages, memorization, and mathematics. He entered the German-speaking Lutheran Fasori Gimnázium in Budapest in the year 1911. Although he attended school at the grade level appropriate to his age, his father hired private tutors to give him advanced instruction in those areas in which he had displayed an aptitude. In 1913, his father was made a nobleman for his service to the Austro-Hungarian empire and acquired the von.

He received his Ph.D. in mathematics (with minors in experimental physics and chemistry) from Pázmány Péter University in Budapest at the age of 22. He simultaneously earned his diploma in chemical engineering from the ETH Zurich in Switzerland at the request of his father, who worried about the financial viability of a career in mathematics. Between 1926 and 1930 he was the youngest privatdozent (professor) in the history of the University of Berlin. By age 25 he had published 10 major papers, and by age 30 nearly 36.

In 1930 von Neumann, his mother, and his brothers emigrated to the United States, following the death of his father in 1929. He anglicized his name to John, keeping the aristocratic surname of von Neumann. That same year he was invited to Princeton University where he became one of four people selected for the first faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study, the others were Albert Einstein, Erwin Panofsky and Kurt Gödel. He was a mathematics professor from its formation in 1933 until his death.

In 1937 von Neumann became a naturalized citizen of the US. In 1938 von Neumann was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize for his work in analysis.

Von Neumann married twice. He married Mariette Kövesi in 1930, just prior to emigrating, and they had his only child, a daughter Marina, who became a distinguished professor of international trade and public policy at the University of Michigan. After his divorce in 1937, von Neumann married Klara Dan in 1938.

In 1955 von Neumann was appointed by President Eisenhower as a member of the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission, and he and Klara moved to Washington D.c. That same year he was diagnosed with cancer, possibly caused by exposure to radiation during his witnessing of atomic bomb tests. He died a year and a half later, in February 1957, in great pain. He died under military security lest he reveal military secrets while heavily medicated.

Von Neumann wrote 150 published papers in his life; 60 in pure mathematics, 20 in physics, and 60 in applied mathematics. His last work, published in book form as The Computer and the Brain, which arose out of his invitation to deliver the Silliman Lectures at Yale University in the spring of 1956, gives an indication of the direction of his interests at the time of his death.