John von Neumann

28 December 1903, Budapest, Austria-Hungary – 8 February 1957, Washington, D.C., United States (aged 53)

Hungarian-American mathematician whose 1945 report defined the stored-program computer. An early participant in the Macy Conferences, he later developed the theory of self-reproducing automata.

Life

Von Neumann was a prodigy in Budapest, taking a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Budapest and a chemical engineering degree in Zürich at the same time. He worked with David Hilbert in Göttingen and taught in Berlin and Hamburg before moving to Princeton in 1930, and in 1933 became one of the first professors at the Institute for Advanced Study. During and after the war he consulted for the Manhattan Project and the US government on nuclear weapons. He died of cancer at Walter Reed hospital in Washington at 53.

Influences

Hilbert’s programme of putting mathematics on axiomatic foundations shaped his early work. McCulloch and Pitts’s 1943 paper on logical neurons gave him a model he used directly in his design for the stored-program computer, and Alan Turing’s theory of computation underpinned his later work on automata.

Contributions

Von Neumann made foundational contributions to set theory, quantum mechanics, game theory (with Oskar Morgenstern, 1944) and numerical computing. His “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC” (1945) described a computer that stores its program in memory, the design used by nearly every computer since. At the Institute for Advanced Study he led the IAS computer project, engineered by Julian Bigelow.

He took part in the early Macy Conferences and in the 1948 Hixon Symposium gave his lecture on “The General and Logical Theory of Automata”, asking how a machine could build a copy of itself. His answer, the universal constructor, anticipated the role of DNA. His unfinished Silliman lectures, published as The Computer and the Brain (1958), compared the two kinds of computation and stressed their differences.

Why it matters today

The computers on which today’s AI runs follow von Neumann’s architecture, and his work on self-replicating automata underlies artificial life research. His late view that the brain computes very differently from digital machines remains an open question.

Further reading

  • John von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain (1958)
  • George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral (2012)

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