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[ John von Neumann ] [ Vladimir Kotelnikov ] [ Leon Brillouin ] [ Andrey Kolmogorov ] 
John Louis von NeumannBorn: 28 December 1903, Budapest, HungaryDied: 8 February 1957, Washington DC Von Neumann was a child prodigy, born into a banking family is Budapest, Hungary. When only six years old he could divide eight-digit numbers in his head. He received his early education in Budapest, under the tutelage of M. Fekete, with whom he published his first paper at the age of 18. Entering the University of Budapest in 1921, he studied Chemistry, moving his base of studies to both Berlin and Zurich before receiving his diploma in 1925 in Chemical Engineering. He returned to his first love of mathematics in completing his doctoral degree in 1928. he quickly gained a reputation in set theory, algebra, and quantum mechanics. At a time of political unrest in central Europe, he was invited to visit Princeton University in 1930, and when the Institute for Advanced Studies was founded there in 1933, he was appointed to be one of the original six Professors of Mathematics, a position which he retained for the remainder of his life. At the instigation and sponsorship of Oskar Morganstern, von Neumann and Kurt Gödel became US citizens in time for their clearance for wartime work. There is an anecdote which tells of Morganstern driving them to their immigration interview, after having learned about the US Constitution and the history of the country. On the drive there Morganstern asked them if they had any questions which he could answer. Gödel replied that he had no questions but he had found some logical inconsistencies in the Constitution that he wanted to ask the Immigration officers about. Morganstern strongly recommended that he not ask questions, just answer them! During 1936 through 1938 Alan Turing was a graduate student in the Department of Mathematics at Princeton and did his dissertation under Alonzo Church. Von Neumann invited Turing to stay on at the Institute as his assistant but he preferred to return to Cambridge; a year later Turing was involved in war work at Bletchley Park. This visit occurred shortly after Turing's publication of his 1934 paper "On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungs-problem" which involved the concepts of logical design and the universal machine. It must be concluded that von Neumann knew of Turing's ideas, though whether he applied them to the design of the IAS Machine ten years later is questionable. Von Neumann's interest in computers differed from that of his peers by his quickly perceiving the application of computers to applied mathematics for specific problems, rather than their mere application to the development of tables. During the war, von Neumann's expertise in hydrodynamics, ballistics, meteorology, game theory, and statistics, was put to good use in several projects. This work led him to consider the use of mechanical devices for computation, and although the stories about von Neumann imply that his first computer encounter was with the ENIAC, in fact it was with Howard Aiken's Harvard Mark I (ASCC) calculator. His correspondence in 1944 shows his interest with the work of not only Aiken but also the electromechanical relay computers of George Stibitz, and the work by Jan Schilt at the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University. By the latter years of World War II von Neumann was playing the part of an executive management consultant, serving on several national committees, applying his amazing ability to rapidly see through problems to their solutions. Through this means he was also a conduit between groups of scientists who were otherwise shielded from each other by the requirements of secrecy. He brought together the needs of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (and the Manhattan Project) with the capabilities of firstly the engineers at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering who were building the ENIAC, and later his own work on building the IAS machine. Several "supercomputers" were built by National Laboratories as copies of his machine. Postwar von Neumann concentrated on the development of the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) computer and its copies around the world. His work with the Los Alamos group continued and he continued to develop the synergism between computers capabilities and the needs for computational solutions to nuclear problems related to the hydrogen bomb. Any computer scientist who reviews the formal obituaries of John von Neumann
of the period shortly after his death will be struck by the lack of recognition
of his involvement in the field of computers and computing. His Academy of
Sciences biography, written by Salomon Bochner [1958], for example, includes but
a single, short paragraph in ten pages - "... in 1944 von Neumann's attention
turned to computing machines and, somewhat surprisingly, he decided to build his
own. As the years progressed, he appeared to thrive on the multitudinousness of
his tasks. It has been stated that von Neumann's electronic computer hastened
the hydrogen bomb explosion on November 1, 1952." Dieudonné [1981] is a little
more generous with words but appears to confuse the concept of the stored
program concept with the wiring of computers: From the point of view of von Neumann's contributions to the field of
computing, including the application of his concepts of mathematics to
computing, and the application of computing to his other interests such as
mathematical physics and economics, perhaps the most comprehensive is by Herman
Goldstine [1972]. There has been some criticism of Goldstine's perspective since
he personally was intimately involved in von Neumann's computing activities from
the time of their chance meeting on the railroad platform at Aberdeen in 1944 through their
joint activities at the Institute for Advanced Studies in developing the IAS
machine.
There is no doubt that his insights into the organization of machines led to
the infrastructure which is now known as the "von Neumann Architecture".
However, von Neumann's ideas were not along those lines originally; he
recognized the need for parallelism in computers but equally well recognized the
problems of construction and hence settled for a sequential system of
implementation. Through the report entitled First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC
[1945], authored solely by von Neumann, the basic elements of the stored program
concept were introduced to the industry. A retrospective examination of the
development of
this idea reveals that the concept was discussed by J. Presper Eckert, John
Mauchly, Arthur Burks, and others in connection with their plans for a successor
machine to the ENIAC. The "Draft Report" was just that, a draft, and although
written by von Neumann was intended to be the joint publication of the whole
group. The EDVAC was intended to be the first stored program computer, but the
summer school at the Moore School in 1946 there was so much emphasis in the
EDVAC that Maurice Wilkes, Cambridge University Mathematical Laboratory,
conceived his own design for the EDSAC, which became the world's first
operational, production, stored-program computer.
In the 1950's von Neumann was employed as a consultant to IBM to review
proposed and ongoing advanced technology projects. One day a week, von Neumann
"held court" at 590 Madison Avenue, New York. On one of these occasions in 1954
he was confronted with the FORTRAN concept; John Backus remembered von Neumann
being unimpressed and that he asked "why would you want more than machine
language?" Frank Beckman, who was also present, recalled that von Neumann
dismissed the whole development as "but an application of the idea of Turing's
`short code'." Donald Gillies, one of von Neumann's students at Princeton, and
later a faculty member at the University of Illinois, recalled in the mid-1970's
that the graduates students were being "used" to hand assemble programs into
binary for their early machine (probably the IAS machine). He took time out to
build an assembler, but when von Neumann found out about he was very angry,
saying (paraphrased), "It is a waste of a valuable scientific computing
instrument to use it to do clerical work."
One last anecdote about von Neumann's brilliant mathematical capabilities.
The von Neumann household in Princeton was open to many social activities and on
one such occasion someone posed the "fly and the train" problem to von Neumann.
Quickly von Neumann came up with the answer. Suspecting that he had seen through
the problem to discover a simple solution, he was asked how he solved the
problem. "Simple", he responded, "I summed the series!" [From Nick Metropolis]
Charney, J. G., R. Fjörtoft and John von Neumann. 1950. "Numerical
Integration of the Barotropic Vorticity Equation", Tellus, Vol. 2, pp.
237-254.
Taub, A. H. (ed). 1961-63. John von Neumann: Collected Works,
1903-1957, 6 Vols., Pergamon Press, Oxford (UK).
von Neumann, John and Oskar Morgenstern. 1944. Theory of Games and
Economic Behavior, Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton NJ.
von Neumann, John. 30 June 1945. First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,
Contract No. W-670-ORD-492, Moore School of Electrical Engineering, Univ. of
Penn., Philadelphia. Reprinted (in part) in Randell, Brian. 1982. Origins of
Digital Computers: Selected Papers, Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg, pp.
383-392.
von Neumann, John. 1946. "The Principles of Large-Scale Computing Machines",
reprinted in Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 263-273.
von Neumann, John. 1958. The Computer and the Brain, Yale Univ. Press,
New Haven.
von Neumann, John and Arthur W. Burks. 1966. Theory of Self-Reproducing
Automata, Univ. of Illinois Press, Urbana IL.
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The
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) continues to honor John
von Neumann through the presentation of an annual award in his name. The IEEE
John von Neumann Medal was established by the Board of Directors in 1990 and may
be presented annually "for outstanding achievements in computer-related science
and technology." The achievements may be theoretical, technological, or
entrepreneurial, and need not have been made immediately prior to the date of
the award.