Life of john von neumann
•
John von Neumann – The Man from the Future
Before I read The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya, I only knew about John von Neumann in two contexts: that computers use the von Neumann architecture, and that he appeared in a story about a mathematical problem I remember from many years ago. After reading it, I understand what a genius he was, and how much of science in the 20th century he influenced. He deserves to be better known than I think he is, and this is a great book to learn about him.
The von Neumann architecture means instructions and data are both stored in the same kind of memory, and instructions are fetched from memory and executed in order. This is taken for granted now, but this way of organizing computers was not a given when computers were invented.
The story of the mathematical problem I remember is this:
Two trains are 60 kilometers apart, traveling towards each other on the same track. Each train is moving at a constant speed of 30 • Mathematician John von Neumann was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1903. As a very young child, he impressed the people around him with his incredible memory. It was said that he could memorize pages of the phone book and divide 8-digit numbers in his head by the age of six. He was recognized as the best math student in Hungary in 1921. In 1925, he received his bachelor's grad in chemical engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Technische Hochschule) in Zurich, and in 1926, he completed his doctoral degree in mathematics at the University of Budapest. In 1930, von Neumann was invited to the United States to teach at Princeton University. He settled there, became a U.S. citizen, and spent a great deal of time during the course of his career moving among Princeton, New Jersey; Los Alamos, New Mexico; and Washington D.C. In 1933, Princeton established the Institute for Advanced Studies and asked von Neumann to be one of its original six professors •John von Neumann
Quick Info
Budapest, Hungary
Washington D.C., USA Biography
John von Neumann was born János von Neumann. He was called Jancsi as a child, a diminutive form eller gestalt of János, then later he was called Johnny in the United States. His father, högsta Neumann, was a top banker and he was brought up in a extended family, living in Budapest where as a child he learnt languages from the German and French governesses that were employed. Although the family were Jewish, Max Neumann did not observe the strict practices of that religion and the household seemed to mix Jewish and Christian traditions.
It is also worth explaining how Max Neumann's son acquired the "von" to become János von Neumann. Max Neumann was eligible to apply for a