John von Neumann

He had moved to Budapest from Pécs at the end of the 1880s.

Miksa's father and grandfather were born in Ond (now part of Szerencs), Zemplén County, northern Hungary.

John's mother was Kann Margit (English: Margaret Kann); her parents were Jakab Kann and Katalin Meisels of the Meisels family.

Three generations of the Kann family lived in spacious apartments above the Kann-Heller offices in Budapest; von Neumann's family occupied an 18-room apartment on the top floor.

John von Neumann (Neumann János Lajos ; (December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. He had perhaps the widest coverage of any mathematician of his time, integrating pure and applied sciences and making major contributions to many fields, including mathematics, physics, economics, computing, and statistics. He was a pioneer in building the mathematical framework of quantum physics, in the development of functional analysis, and in game theory, introducing or codifying concepts including cellular automata, the universal constructor and the digital computer. His analysis of the structure of self-replication preceded the discovery of the structure of DNA.

During World War II, von Neumann worked on the Manhattan Project.

He developed the mathematical models behind the explosive lenses used in the implosion-type nuclear weapon.

Before and after the war, he consulted for many organizations including the Office of Scientific Research and Development, the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Von Neumann was born in Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), on December 28, 1903, to a wealthy, non-observant Jewish family.

His birth name was Neumann János Lajos.

In Hungarian, the family name comes first, and his given names are equivalent to John Louis in English.

He was the eldest of three brothers; his two younger siblings were Mihály (Michael) and Miklós (Nicholas).

His father Neumann Miksa (Max von Neumann) was a banker and held a doctorate in law.

On February 20, 1913, Emperor Franz Joseph elevated John's father to the Hungarian nobility for his service to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The Neumann family thus acquired the hereditary appellation Margittai, meaning "of Margitta" (today Marghita, Romania).

The family had no connection with the town; the appellation was chosen in reference to Margaret, as was their chosen coat of arms depicting three marguerites.

Neumann János became margittai Neumann János (John Neumann de Margitta), which he later changed to the German Johann von Neumann.

Von Neumann was a child prodigy who at six years old could divide two eight-digit numbers in his head and converse in Ancient Greek.

He, his brothers and his cousins were instructed by governesses.

Von Neumann's father believed that knowledge of languages other than their native Hungarian was essential, so the children were tutored in English, French, German and Italian.

By age eight, von Neumann was familiar with differential and integral calculus, and by twelve he had read Borel's La Théorie des Fonctions.

He was also interested in history, reading Wilhelm Oncken's 46-volume world history series Allgemeine Geschichte in Einzeldarstellungen (General History in Monographs).

One of the rooms in the apartment was converted into a library and reading room.

Von Neumann entered the Lutheran Fasori Evangélikus Gimnázium in 1914.

Eugene Wigner was a year ahead of von Neumann at the school and soon became his friend.

Although von Neumann's father insisted that he attend school at the grade level appropriate to his age, he agreed to hire private tutors to give von Neumann advanced instruction.

At 15, he began to study advanced calculus under the analyst Gábor Szegő.

By 19, von Neumann had published two major mathematical papers, the second of which gave the modern definition of ordinal numbers, which superseded Georg Cantor's definition.

At the conclusion of his education at the gymnasium, he applied for and won the Eötvös Prize, a national award for mathematics.

According to his friend Theodore von Kármán, von Neumann's father wanted John to follow him into industry, and asked von Kármán to persuade his son not to take mathematics.

Von Neumann and his father decided that the best career path was chemical engineering.

This was not something that von Neumann had much knowledge of, so it was arranged for him to take a two-year, non-degree course in chemistry at the University of Berlin, after which he sat for the entrance exam to ETH Zurich, which he passed in September 1923.

Simultaneously von Neumann entered Pázmány Péter University in Budapest, as a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics.

For his thesis, he produced an axiomatization of Cantor's set theory.

At the peak of his influence in the 1950s, he chaired a number of Defense Department committees including the Strategic Missile Evaluation Committee and the ICBM Scientific Advisory Committee.

He was also a member of the influential Atomic Energy Commission in charge of all atomic energy development in the country.

He played a key role alongside Bernard Schriever and Trevor Gardner in the design and development of the United States' first ICBM programs.

At that time he was considered the nation's foremost expert on nuclear weaponry and the leading defense scientist at the U.S. Department of Defense.

Von Neumann's contributions and intellectual ability drew praise from colleagues in physics, mathematics, and beyond.

Accolades he received range from the Medal of Freedom to a crater on the Moon named in his honor.