In many ways, John von Neumann was larger than life. In addition to his bold intellectual speculations and his dominating presence in academic politics, he enjoyed food, drink, and attending parties where ribald commentary was the order of the day. On February 8, 1957, however, von Neumann died of bone cancer, which had become excruciatingly painful and had spread to his brain. Von Neumann seems to have undergone a psychological and spiritual crisis in his last days as he faced death (which he viewed as an end to the exquisite possibilities of thought) and as he was robbed of the intellect that he had so highly prized.
Von Neumann received many awards reflecting his diverse con- tributions to American science and technology. These include the Distinguished Civilian Service Award (1947), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1956), and the Enrico Fermi Award (1956).
To some critics of cold-war nuclear policy, von Neumann was at least a partial accomplice in the unleashing of the nuclear demon. However, mathematicians and physicists continue to turn to him as an example of creative, original ideas. For computer scientists, von Neumann was perhaps the person who did the most to shape the design of the marvelous machines that sit today on so many desktops—and to introduce the computer as a universal tool for simulation.
Chronology
1903 John von Neumann is born on December 28 in Budapest, Hungary
1911 Von Neumann enters high school but is soon doing college- level mathematics
1921 Von Neumann attends the University of Berlin to study chemi- cal engineering
1923 Von Neumann moves to the University of Technology in Zurich and earns an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering 1926 Having periodically returned to Hungary to pursue his math-
ematics studies, von Neumann earns his doctorate in math- ematics at the University of Budapest
1926–30 Von Neumann serves as a lecturer in Berlin and Hamburg 1931 Von Neumann becomes a professor of mathematical physics
at Princeton University
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THERS
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TANISŁAWU
LAMStanisław Ulam (1909–84) was a Polish-American mathematician who was invited by John von Neumann to join him in the secret nuclear bomb project during World War II. There Ulam developed a key type of computer simulation that relied upon repeated gen- eration of random numbers to mimic the distribution generated by natural laws. (Because of its use of chance, the method was named Monte Carlo after the famous casino resort.)
Ulam contributed to a variety of other aspects of mathematics, including set theory and topology. As his career advanced, Ulam moved away from detailed mathematical work to posing problems and possible connections between mathematical concepts and phe- nomena in physics and biology.
In a tribute to von Neumann, Ulam recalled that they had a con- versation in which they discussed “. . . the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.” This idea would be further explored starting in the 1990s by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge and inventor and artificial intelligence theorist Ray Kurzweil.
1944 Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern publish The Theory of
Games and Economic Behavior
1945 Von Neumann’s draft report on the EDVAC begins his design for the architecture of modern electronic digital computing 1948 Von Neumann begins his work on cellular automata
1954 Von Neumann is appointed to the United States Atomic Energy Commission
1957 Von Neumann dies on February 8 of bone cancer
Further Reading
Books
Aspray, William. John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern
Computing. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990.
Describes the key ideas that von Neumann contributed to the architec- ture that is found in nearly all computers today.
Heims, S. J. John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From
Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1980.
A study of how two geniuses were influenced by (and in turn dealt with) the implications of technology at the service of the military- industrial complex.
MacRae, Norman. John von Neumann: The Scientific Genius
Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, and Much More. 2nd ed. Providence, R.I.: American
Mathematical Society, 1999.
A readable, detailed modern biography of von Neumann that includes previously unpublished information from interviews with colleagues.
von Neumann, John. The Computer and the Brain. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1958.
Includes some of von Neumann’s predictions about the future devel- opment of computers.
———. Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966.
Collection of papers containing the first key developments in the theory of cellular automata.
Articles
Lee, J. A. N. “John Louis von Neumann” Available online. URL: http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/VonNeumann.html. Accessed on July 3, 2006.
Biographical sketch focusing on von Neumann’s contributions to com- puter design.
Ulam, Stanisław. “Tribute to John von Neumann.” Bulletin of the
American Mathematical Society 64 (May 1958): 1–49.
44
D
uring the 1970s, Princeton students would sometimes enter their classrooms in the morning to find that someone had filled the blackboard with a mysterious mixture of abstruse mathemati- cal formulas and unknown codes. According to campus lore, there was a phantom who roamed the halls at night, sometimes shoving papers filled with numerological calculations under a professor’s office door.Unknown to the students (and even most of the faculty), the phantom was a mathematician named John Forbes Nash. Two decades earlier, Nash had revolutionized the understanding of how players in a game—or participants in a business transaction or a labor conflict—formulate strategies and reach a particular result. This “game theory” was now revolutionizing economics, but its originator was lost in a world of delusion, painfully groping for a way back to the life he had known as one of the world’s great math- ematical thinkers.