John von Neumann facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
John von Neumann
|
|
|---|---|
John von Neumann in the 1940s
|
|
| Born | December 28, 1903 |
| Died | February 8, 1957 (aged 53) |
| Nationality | Hungarian, American |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
John von Neumann (December 28. 1903 – February 8. 1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician and physicist who contributed to many fields including:
- set theory
- functional analysis
- quantum mechanics
- ergodic theory
- continuous geometry
- economics
- game theory
- computer science
- numerical analysis
- systems theory
- statistics
He is generally regarded as a prodigy, polymath and one of the most important mathematicians of the 20th century.
He was a member of a group called the 'Martians' who were a group of prominent Hungarian scientists (mostly, but not exclusively, physicists and mathematicians) who emigrated to the United States in the early half of the 20th century. Other people in this group were Edward Teller, Paul Erdős, Leó Szilárd and Eugene Wigner.
Contents
Early life and education
Von Neumann was born in Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary (which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), on December 28, 1903, to a wealthy Jewish family.
He was the eldest of three brothers. His father, Neumann Miksa (Max von Neumann, 1873–1928) was a banker, who held a doctorate in law. He had moved to Budapest from Pécs at the end of the 1880s. John's mother was Kann Margit (English: Margaret Kann).
On February 20, 1913, Emperor Franz Joseph elevated John's father to the Hungarian nobility for his service to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Von Neumann was a child prodigy who at six years old could divide two eight-digit numbers in his head and could converse in Ancient Greek. When the six-year-old von Neumann caught his mother staring aimlessly, he asked her, "What are you calculating?"
When they were young, von Neumann, his brothers and his cousins were instructed by governesses. Von Neumann's father believed that knowledge of languages other than their native Hungarian was essential, so the children were tutored in English, French, German and Italian. By the age of eight, von Neumann was familiar with differential and integral calculus, and by twelve he had read and understood Borel's Théorie des Fonctions. He was also interested in history, reading his way through Wilhelm Oncken's 46-volume world history series Allgemeine Geschichte in Einzeldarstellungen (General History in Monographs). One of the rooms in the apartment was converted into a library and reading room, with bookshelves from ceiling to floor.
Von Neumann entered the Lutheran Fasori Evangélikus Gimnázium in 1914.
Although von Neumann's father insisted that he attend school at the grade level appropriate to his age, he agreed to hire private tutors to give von Neumann advanced instruction. At the age of 15, he began to study advanced calculus under the renowned analyst Gábor Szegő. As for his other subjects, he received a grade of A for all, barring B's in geometrical drawing, writing and music, and a C for physical education. By the age of 19, von Neumann had published two major mathematical papers, the second of which gave the modern definition of ordinal numbers, which superseded Georg Cantor's definition. At the conclusion of his education at the gymnasium, he applied for and won the Eötvös Prize, a national award for mathematics.
According to his friend Theodore von Kármán, von Neumann's father wanted John to follow him into industry, and asked von Kármán to persuade his son not to take mathematics as his major. Von Neumann and his father decided that the best career path was chemical engineering. This was not something that von Neumann had much knowledge of, so it was arranged for him to take a two-year, non-degree course in chemistry at the University of Berlin, after which he sat for the entrance exam to ETH Zurich, which he passed in September 1923. Simultaneously von Neumann also entered Pázmány Péter University in Budapest, as a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics. He graduated as a chemical engineer from ETH Zurich in 1926, and passed his final examinations summa cum laude for his Ph.D. in mathematics (with minors in experimental physics and chemistry) simultaneous with his chemical engineering degree. He then went to the University of Göttingen on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to study mathematics under David Hilbert.
Career and private life
Von Neumann's habilitation was completed on December 13, 1927, and he began to give lectures as a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin in 1928. He was the youngest person ever elected Privatdozent in the university's history in any subject. He began writing nearly one major mathematics paper per month. In 1929, he briefly became a Privatdozent at the University of Hamburg, where the prospects of becoming a tenured professor were better, then in October of that year moved to Princeton University as a visiting lecturer in mathematical physics.
In 1930, von Neumann married Marietta Kövesi, who had studied economics at Budapest University. Von Neumann and Marietta had a daughter, Marina, born in 1935. As of 2021 Marina is a distinguished professor emerita of business administration and public policy at the University of Michigan. The couple divorced on November 2, 1937. On November 17, 1938, von Neumann married Klara Dan, whom he had met before the outbreak of World War II.
In 1933 Von Neumann accepted a tenured professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey, when that institution's plan to appoint Hermann Weyl appeared to have failed. His mother, brothers and in-law followed von Neumann to the United States in 1939. Von Neumann anglicized his first name to John, keeping the German-aristocratic surname von Neumann. His brothers changed theirs to "Neumann" and "Vonneumann". Von Neumann became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1937, and immediately tried to become a lieutenant in the United States Army's Officers Reserve Corps. He passed the exams but was rejected because of his age.
He was also known for always being happy to provide others with scientific and mathematical advice, even when the recipient did not later credit him, which he did on many occasions with mathematicians and scientists of all ability levels.
Klara and John von Neumann were socially active within the local academic community. His white clapboard house at 26 Westcott Road was one of Princeton's largest private residences. He always wore formal suits, including a three-piece pinstripe while riding down the Grand Canyon astride a mule. Von Neumann held a lifelong passion for ancient history and was renowned for his historical knowledge. He enjoyed Yiddish and "off-color" humor (especially limericks). He was a non-smoker. In Princeton, he received complaints for playing extremely loud German march music on his phonograph. Von Neumann did some of his best work in noisy, chaotic environments, including with his wife's phonograph playing loudly. Per Churchill Eisenhart, von Neumann could attend parties until the early hours of the morning and then deliver a lucid lecture at 8:30.
His daughter wrote in her memoirs that he was very concerned with his legacy in two aspects: her life and the durability of his intellectual contributions to the world.
He also maintained his knowledge of languages learnt in his youth. He knew Hungarian, French, German and English fluently, and maintained at least a conversational level of Italian, Yiddish, Latin and Ancient Greek. His Spanish was less perfect, but once on a trip to Mexico he tried to create his own "neo-Castilian" mix of English and Spanish. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of ancient history, and he enjoyed reading Ancient Greek historians such as Thucydides and Herodotus in the original Greek. Ulam suspected they may have shaped his views on how future events could play out and how human nature and society worked in general.
Von Neumann's closest friend in the United States was the mathematician Ulam. Von Neumann believed that much of his mathematical thought occurred intuitively; he would often go to sleep with a problem unsolved and know the answer upon waking up.
Illness and death
Von Neumann died on February 8, 1957 from cancer and was buried at Princeton Cemetery of Nassau Presbyterian Church in Princeton, New Jersey.
Noteworthy work
- His textbook on quantum mechanics is one of the first on this topic.
- His game theory is considered one of the most important tools in competitive strategic management and is also of high importance in biosciences.
- He is the designer of the Von-Neumann architecture, which is basic to nearly all computers today.
- He was one of the first proponents of artificial intelligence. He proposed the idea of self replicating machines. This is why a machine that can replicate itself is now commonly referred to as a 'Von Neumann machine'.
- With Stanislav Ulam, he did some of the most important calculations in the Manhattan project.
- He worked at the Institute of Advanced Studies the same time as Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel and Robert Oppenheimer
- His principles are included in every modern computer, tablet or phone.
Images for kids
-
Von Neumann's birthplace, at 16 Báthory Street, Budapest. Since 1968, it has housed the John von Neumann Computer Society.
-
Excerpt from the university calendars for 1928 and 1928/29 of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin announcing Neumann's lectures on the theory of functions II, axiomatic set theory and mathematical logic, the mathematical colloquium, review of recent work in quantum mechanics, special functions of mathematical physics and Hilbert's proof theory. He also lectured on the theory of relativity, set theory, integral equations and analysis of infinitely many variables.
-
Flow chart from von Neumann's "Planning and coding of problems for an electronic computing instrument," published in 1947.
-
The first implementation of von Neumann's self-reproducing universal constructor. Three generations of machine are shown: the second has nearly finished constructing the third. The lines running to the right are the tapes of genetic instructions, which are copied along with the body of the machines.
-
A simple configuration in von Neumann's cellular automaton. A binary signal is passed repeatedly around the blue wire loop, using excited and quiescent ordinary transmission states. A confluent cell duplicates the signal onto a length of red wire consisting of special transmission states. The signal passes down this wire and constructs a new cell at the end. This particular signal (1011) codes for an east-directed special transmission state, thus extending the red wire by one cell each time. During construction, the new cell passes through several sensitised states, directed by the binary sequence.
-
Implosion mechanism
-
Operation Redwing nuclear test in July 1956
-
The von Neumann crater, on the far side of the Moon.
See also
In Spanish: John von Neumann para niños
