JOHN VON NEUMANN

A. PROFILE
JOHN VON NEUMANN (December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician andpolymath who made major contributions to a vast number of fields,[1] including set theory,functional analysis, quantum mechanics,ergodic theory, geometry, fluid dynamics,economics, linear programming, game theory, computer science, numerical analysis, hydrodynamics, and statistics, as well as many other mathematical fields. He is generally regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians in modern history.

The mathematician Jean Dieudonné called von Neumann "the last of the great mathematicians", while Peter Laxdescribed him as possessing the most "fearsome technical prowess" and "scintillating intellect" of the century, and Hans Bethe stated "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man". Even in Budapest, in the time that produced geniuses likeTheodore von Kármán (b. 1881), George de Hevesy (b. 1885), Leó Szilárd (b. 1898),Eugene Wigner (b. 1902), Edward Teller (b. 1908), and Paul Erdős (b. 1913), his brilliance stood out.

Von Neumann was a pioneer of the application of operator theory to quantum mechanics, in the development of functional analysis, a principal member of theManhattan Project and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (as one of the few originally appointed), and a key figure in the development of game theory[1][7] and the concepts of cellular automata, theuniversal constructor, and the digital computer. Von Neumann's mathematical analysis of the structure of self-replicationpreceded the discovery of the structure of DNA.(Wikipedia)

B. PUBLICATIONS