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John von Neumann - A Lifetime of Contributions

© Jackie DiGiovanni

John von Neumann was born Janos Neumann on December 28, 1903, in Budapest. He was the oldest of three children. His father, Max Neumann, was a prominent banker who purchased a title, after which "von" was appended to the family name. Janos became "Johnny" after he moved to the United States.

While the von Neumann family was Jewish, they followed a variety of religious traditions in the home. John von Neumann was immediately recognized as a child prodigy. His command of mathematical concepts was apparent by the time he was six. The family stressed education, and John studied at the Lutheran Gymnasium. His intellect embraced many subjects.

At age twenty, he authored a paper on the definition of ordinal numbers, and his definition is still being used. He enrolled at the University of Berlin in 1921, making his father happy by studying chemistry. Max Neumann believed there was more money to be made in chemistry than in mathematics. John simultaneously enrolled at the University of Budapest in mathematics. As the story goes, von Neumann never attended class at the University of Budapest. He would show up only for the examinations.

He transferred his chemistry studies to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, from which he graduated in 1926. He went on to receive a doctoral degree in mathematics in 1926 from the University of Budapest.

Von Neumann lectured at the University of Berlin from 1926 to 1929, and then at the University of Hamburg from 1929 to 1930. He also did some postdoctoral work at the University of Gottingen.

In 1929 von Neumann married Marietta Kovesi and in 1930 left for the United States, where he had been invited to lecture at Princeton. He was named a professor in 1931. Because his own intellect towered over that of his students, he was not considered a successful lecturer. In 1933, when the Institute for Advanced Studies was founded at Princeton, von Neumann became a professor of mathematics; he remained at IAS until his death.

In 1933 von Neumann became co-editor of the Annals of Mathematics and, in 1935, co-editor of Compositio Mathematica. He remained an editor of these two journals until his death.

The von Neumanns divorced in 1937, and he remarried in 1938 to Klara Dan.

He created the concept of game theory, proved the theorem of minimax and one of his books, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), is considered a classic text.

While at IAS von Neumann turned his attention to computers as they might relate to solving specific problems. He wrote about storing computational instructions and is considered the father of the digital computer.

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