John Von Neumann Popular Books

John Von Neumann Biography & Facts

John von Neumann ( von NOY-mən; Hungarian: Neumann János Lajos [ˈnɒjmɒn ˈjaːnoʃ ˈlɒjoʃ]; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian and 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. 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. Life and education Family background 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. 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 (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. 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. Child prodigy 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. University studies 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. He graduated as a chemical engineer from ETH Zurich in 1926, and simultaneously passed his final examinations summa cum laude for his Ph.D. in mathematics (with minors in experimental physics and chemistry). He then went to the University of Göttingen on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to study mathematics under David Hilbert. Hermann Weyl remembers how in the winter of 1926–1927 von Neumann, Emmy Noether, and he would walk through "the cold, wet, rain-wet streets of Göttingen" after class discussing hypercomplex number systems and their representations. Career and private life Von Neumann's habilitation was completed on December 13, 1927, and he began to give lectures as a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin in 1928. He was the youngest person elected Privatdozent in the university's history. He began writing nearly one major mathematics paper per month. In 1929, he briefly became a Privatdozent at the University of Hamburg, where the prospects of becoming a tenured professor were better, then in October of that year moved to Princeton University as a visiting lecturer in mathematical physics. Von Neumann was baptized a Catholic in 1930. Shortly afterwa.... Discover the John Von Neumann popular books. Find the top 100 most popular John Von Neumann books.

Best Seller John Von Neumann Books of 2024

  • Die bedeutendsten Mathematiker synopsis, comments

    Die bedeutendsten Mathematiker

    Stephanie Fröba & Alfred Wassermann

    In biographischwerkgeschichtlichen Porträts werden die Schlüsselfiguren und deren Gedankengänge vorgestellt, die von der Blütezeit der griechischen Antike bis hin zur Schwelle des ...

  • The Innovators synopsis, comments

    The Innovators

    Walter Isaacson

    Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson’s New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed The Innovators is a “riveting, propulsive, and at times dee...

  • The MANIAC synopsis, comments

    The MANIAC

    Benjamín Labatut

    Named One of the 10 Best Books of 2023 by The Washington Post and Publishers Weekly One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2023 A National Bestseller A New York Times Editor's ...

  • John von Neumann synopsis, comments

    John von Neumann

    Norman Macrae

    John von Neumann was a Jewish refugee from Hungary considered a “genius” like fellow Hungarians Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller, who played key roles developing the Ab...

  • The World as a Mathematical Game synopsis, comments

    The World as a Mathematical Game

    Giorgio Israel & Ana Millán Gasca

    Galileo and Newton’s work towards the mathematisation of the physical world; Leibniz’s universal logical calculus; the Enlightenment’s mathématique sociale. John von Neumann inheri...

  • El hombre del futuro synopsis, comments

    El hombre del futuro

    Ananyo Bhattacharya

    Una emocionante nueva biografía de John von Neumann, el genio perdido que inventó nuestro mundo: los teléfonos inteligentes que hoy llevamos en nuestros bolsillos, las mentes ciber...

  • The Code Breaker synopsis, comments

    The Code Breaker

    Walter Isaacson

    A Best Book of 2021 by Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Time, and The Washington PostThe bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs returns with a “compelling” (The Washington P...

  • The Waltz of Reason synopsis, comments

    The Waltz of Reason

    Karl Sigmund

    "A mindbending jaunt ... that makes clear in fascinating detail how math is more than a sum of its parts" (Publishers Weekly) “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here,” Plato wa...

  • Culture synopsis, comments

    Culture

    John Brockman

    "Theway Brockman interlaces essays about research on the frontiers of science withones on artistic vision, education, psychology and economics is sure to buzzany brain." Chicago Su...

  • The Code Breaker -- Young Readers Edition synopsis, comments

    The Code Breaker -- Young Readers Edition

    Walter Isaacson

    Walter Isaacson’s #1 New York Times bestselling history of our third scientific revolution: CRISPR, gene editing, and the quest to understand the code of life itself, is now adapte...