Textbook of AI

1903–1957, Mathematician, physicist, computer scientist

Also known as: János Lajos Neumann, Johann von Neumann

John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician of legendary breadth whose contributions span pure mathematics, mathematical physics, economics, computer science and the design of nuclear weapons. He is, after Alan Turing, the second great architect of the digital computer. His 1945 First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC described what is now called the von Neumann architecture: a single addressable memory storing both program and data, a central arithmetic-logic unit, a control unit, and input–output. The design was so dominant that it remains, with pipeline and cache refinements, the architecture of every general-purpose CPU built since.

With Oskar Morgenstern he wrote Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), founding game theory and giving economics its modern mathematical foundations; the minimax theorem for two-person zero-sum games dates from his 1928 paper. His work on cellular automata and self-reproducing machines, posthumously published as Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata (1966), anticipated artificial life, software viruses and the entire field of nanotechnology.

Von Neumann was a key figure on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, contributing to the implosion design of the plutonium bomb and to early Monte Carlo methods for neutron diffusion calculations. In his final years he turned to the relationship between brains and computers; The Computer and the Brain (1958), drafted on his deathbed, compares the parallel slow-and-noisy circuits of the brain with the serial fast-and-precise circuits of computers and asks how far either model can be pushed. He died of cancer at 53, possibly contracted from radiation exposure at the Los Alamos tests.