On this day in 1903, physicist and mathematician John von Neumann was born in Budapest, Hungary. He was originally called Neumann János Lajos (in Hungarian the family name comes first). He was the eldest of three brothers. His father, Neumann Miksa (Max Neumann) was a banker.
In 1913, his father was elevated to the nobility for his service to the Austro-Hungarian Empire by Emperor Francis Joseph. The Neumann family thus acquired the hereditary appellation Margittai. Neumann János became Margittai Neumann János (John Neumann of Marghita), which he later changed to the German Johann von Neumann.
von Neumann was a child prodigy in the areas of language, memorization, and mathematics. As a 6-year-old, he could divide two 8-digit numbers in his head.By the age of 8, he was familiar with differential and integral calculus. At 15, he was studying advanced calculus and by 19, von Neumann had published two major mathematical papers, the second of which gave the modern definition of ordinal numbers. Over the next eight years he would publish an additional thirty major papers in mathematics.
He received his Ph.D. in mathematics (with minors in experimental physics and chemistry) from Pázmány Péter University in Budapest at the age of 22. Simultaneously he earned a diploma in chemical engineering from the ETH Zürich in Switzerland at his father's request, who wanted his son to follow him into industry.
Between 1928 and 1932, he taught as a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin. In 1933, he was offered one of the first positions on the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey; von Neumann remained a mathematics professor there until his death. Von Neumann anglicized his first name to John, keeping the German-aristocratic surname of von Neumann. In 1937, after some difficulty, von Neumann became a United States naturalized citizen. Immediately he tried to enlist in the US Army Reserve but was rejected because of his age. Instead, he soon became an consultant to a number of secret military projects, most notably the Manhattan Project.
Von Neumann's principal contribution to the atomic bomb was in the concept and design of the explosive lenses needed to compress the plutonium core of the Trinity test device and the "Fat Man" weapon that was later dropped on Nagasaki. While von Neumann did not originate the "implosion" concept, he was one of its most persistent proponents, encouraging its continued development against the instincts of many of his colleagues, who felt such a design to be unworkable. He also eventually came up with the idea of using more powerful shaped charges and less fissionable material to greatly increase the speed of "assembly" (compression). As an aside, much of this work in shock wave physics led to notable applications in astrophysics and aerodynamics.
Von Neumann wrote 150 published papers in his life; 60 in pure mathematics, 20 in physics, and 60 in applied mathematics. His last work, an unfinished manuscript later published as a book called "The Computer and the Brain," was written while he was in the hospital dying of cancer. He died on February 8, 1957. You can read his Physics Today obituary (which I've made free to all visitors for the next month) at http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.3060351
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