John Von Neumann was born on December 28, 1903 in Budapest. His father was a
banker. John was a child prodigy. At the age of 6, he could divide two
8-digit numbers in his head. At 8, he mastered calculus; by 12 he was at the
graduate level in mathematics. At 17, his father tried to get him to become
something more financially practical then a mathematician. John agreed to
study chemistry along with mathematics. He studied chemistry in Berlin and
then Zurich and mathematics in Budapest. In 1926, at the age of 23, he
received his degree in chemical engineering and a Ph.D. on mathematics. In
1932 he published his first book in quantum mechanics.
John played a major role in the production of the atomic bomb. He used
his mathematical skills to control and use shock waves. Towards the end of
the war, he became involved with the development of computing machines. His
idea was to store the programs in the machine as simply another kind of
electronic data. His "von Neumann machinesâ€" used "parallel processing,""
which perform their operations sequentially. After the war, he served as a
consultant to the armed forces. Proposed the implosion method for bringing
nuclear fuel to explosion and participated in the development of the hydrogen
John was interested in complicated automata, such as the human nervous
system and the larger computers he saw in the future. The two problems in
automata theory that von Neumann concentrated on are both intimately related
to complexity. These are the problems of reliability and self-reproduction.
The reliability of computers limits the complexity of the automata of
In 1944, von Neumann built his own computing machine. This machine
hastened the production of the hydrogen bomb. He introduced new procedures
in the logical organization. His mathematical skills helped in the
production of the IAS machine. His...