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© Copyright 2001, Jim Loy
John (called Johnny by his friends) von Neumann (the last two parts of his name are pronounced as in German) was sometimes called the man with the best brain in the world. His mind was certainly fast. He was able to do complicated arithmetic calculations instantly, and immediately see the solutions to serious mathematical problems which completely stumped other first rate mathematicians. And his memory was photographic; apparently he remembered almost every word he ever read.
Someone said, "Most mathematicians prove what they can; von Neumann proves what he wants." Hans Bethe said, "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man." Someone joked that von Neumann was actually an outer space alien who had trained himself to perfectly imitate a human being in every way. He was swave and debonaire, as befitted a Hungarian nobleman.
He was born in 1903, in Budapest, Hungary, to a family of minor nobility. He studied chemistry, graduated in chemical engineering, and got his Ph.D. in mathematics, at the University of Budapest. He lectured at universities in Germany, working on quantum physics and mathematical operator theory. He showed that these two disciplines can be viewed the same subject. In 1930 he became visiting lecturer at Princeton, and later worked at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study.
He became one of the founders of ergodic theory (in statistics and physics). He proved part of the fifth problem of David Hilbert's basic unsolved problems of mathematics. He was one of the founders of "rings of operators," which became known as Neumann algebras. He is most famous for founding game theory. He began as a specialist in pure mathematics (in which practical uses are avoided), and then turned to applied mathematics and physics. He can be considered one of the many inventors and early theorists of the digital computer, helping to originate the fields of numerical analysis, algorithms, simulation, and others. And he achieved important results in many other branches of mathematics.
During World War II, von Neumann worked on the atomic bomb. After the war, he worked on the hydrogen bomb. In 1954, he was appointed a member of the Atomic Energy Commission. Although he was a peaceful person, after the USSR acquired the hydrogen bomb, he advocated a preemptive nuclear strike to neutralize the threat, based on his studies of game theory.
He died in 1957, of cancer, at the age of 53.