John von Neumann

Timeline

1. 1921–1926

   Chemistry and a mathematics doctorate

   Born in Budapest in 1903, he completes his schooling at the Lutheran Gymnasium in 1921 and studies chemistry at the University of Berlin and in Zürich. In 1926, he earns a diploma in chemical engineering from the Technische Hochschule in Zürich and a mathematics doctorate from the University of Budapest with a thesis on set theory.

2. 1926–1933

   A founding IAS professor

   He lectures at Berlin from 1926 to 1929 and at Hamburg until 1930, then joins Princeton University as a visiting lecturer in 1930 and becomes a professor there in 1931. His 1932 book Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics gives the new quantum mechanics a solid mathematical framework. In 1933, he becomes one of the six original mathematics professors at the Institute for Advanced Study, a position he keeps for the rest of his life.

3. 1943–1944

   Implosion bombs and game theory

   He joins the Manhattan Project in 1943, where his main contribution is the concept and design of the explosive lenses used in the implosion bombs. In 1944, he and Oskar Morgenstern publish Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, which extends his minimax theorem to games with imperfect information and more than two players.

4. June 1945

   The EDVAC First Draft

   His incomplete, 101-page First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC is distributed in June 1945 and contains the first published description of the logical design of a stored-program computer. He builds the design from "E elements" modeled on the biological neuron, a model he credits to Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts.

5. 1946–1951

   Building the IAS machine

   The IAS machine, the first electronic computer built at the Institute for Advanced Study, is built under his direction from 1946 to 1951. He arranges its financing, and the nearby RCA Research Laboratory designs and builds its components.

6. 1948–1966

   Self-reproducing automata

   In lectures in 1948 and 1949, including talks at the University of Illinois in 1949, he proposes a self-reproducing automaton. By 1952, he designs a two-dimensional cellular automaton, with 29 possible states per cell, that copies its own initial configuration. Arthur Burks completes his book Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata in 1966, and the universal constructor it describes is regarded as foundational for automata theory, complex systems and artificial life.

7. 1955–1957

   A seat on the Atomic Energy Commission

   President Eisenhower appoints him to the Atomic Energy Commission in 1955. In 1956, he receives the Enrico Fermi Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He dies in Washington in February 1957.

8. 1956–1958

   The Computer and the Brain

   Illness prevents him from delivering Yale's Silliman Lectures on The Computer and the Brain, planned for spring 1956. Yale University Press publishes the unfinished manuscript in May 1958. The book explores the analogies between computing machines and the human brain and concludes that the brain operates both digitally and analogically, with its own statistical language.