John von Neumann

By Laura Whitfield

He was the smartest person in every room he ever entered, including rooms full of Nobel laureates — and he redesigned the world twice before dying at fifty-three. John von Neumann was born Neumann János in 1903 in Budapest, into a wealthy banking family, a child prodigy who could divide eight-digit numbers in his head at six and published his first mathematics paper as a teenager. In the 1930s at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, he gave quantum mechanics its rigorous mathematical foundation — the formalism every physicist still uses. But his immortality lies elsewhere. In 1944, with the economist Oskar Morgenstern, he published 'Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,' inventing game theory: the mathematics of strategy, of conflict and cooperation, which would reshape economics, evolutionary biology, nuclear deterrence, and artificial intelligence. And in 1945, working on the ENIAC project, he wrote the 'First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC' — the stored-program architecture, where instructions and data live together in memory. Nearly every computer on earth, including the one you are reading this on, is still a von Neumann machine. He consulted on the Manhattan Project, where his calculations on implosion lenses made the plutonium bomb possible, and became America's high priest of computing and Cold War strategy. He also sketched self-reproducing automata, the theoretical ancestors of both computer viruses and artificial life. Cancer, likely from radiation exposure at atomic tests he had attended, killed him in 1957; on his deathbed he was still dictating mathematics. The twentieth century's operating system was, in large part, written by this one Hungarian mind. His game theory now prices derivatives, designs auctions, and trains artificial intelligences that bluff at poker better than humans. His self-reproducing automata inspired the concept of von Neumann probes — machines that could colonize the galaxy. He saw further than his century in every direction he looked.

Impact on civilization

Von Neumann gave civilization the computer as we know it — the stored-program architecture underlies every smartphone, server, and spacecraft. Game theory gave economics, biology, and strategy a mathematics of rational conflict, earning Nobels for his successors and shaping Cold War deterrence. Quantum theory's mathematical foundations are his. Few humans have ever had so many distinct fields depend on one brain. He is the rare figure whose work is simultaneously the foundation of an industry, a science, and a strategy — computing, quantum theory, and game theory each carry his architecture.