NEUMANN, János
(John von)
* 28. 12. 1903, Budapest, Hungary
† 9. 2. 1957, Washington, D.C., USA
mathematician
N. was born into a wealthy family and attended the evangelical school in Budapest. Immediately thereafter, from 1921 he studied mathematics at the Faculty of Arts in Budapest and continued his studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, where he studied chemical engineering. In 1925 he earned his diploma in chemical engineering and in the next year received his Ph.D. in mathematics (with „summa cum laude “). Later on he went to Germany and completed habilitation at the University of Berlin in 1929 and became a private mathematics senior lecturer at the University of Hamburg. In 1930 an invitation to become a visiting professor at Princeton University led him in the USA for the first time, but he returned to Germany already in 1931. In the same year, however, he again left the country for political reasons and permanently moved with his wife to the United States, near Princeton, where he worked as a professor at the University and at the acknowledged Institute for Advanced Studies.
Here N. dealt with the mathematical-based quantum mechanics and in 1932 he wrote a monograph on that subject. He also wrote about the problems regarding ballistics and hydrodynamics. During World War II he was involved in the Manhattan Project, which was concerned with the development of computer based programmable logic controllers and in 1944 made a plan for computer EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic System), which became operational in 1952. After the war he was a member of the Atomic Energy Commission and continued to deal with issues of programming. N. has received numerous awards (including Einstein Medal and Prize Fermi). When President Eisenhower solemnly presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he was confined to a wheelchair, due to bone cancer.
