Biography:

John von Neumann original name was János Neumann. He was born on  December 28, 1903 in Budapest, Hungary. And he died on February 8, 1957 in Washington, D.C., U.S. He was an Hungarian-born American mathematician. Neumann was described as the scientific genius who pioneered the modern computer, game theory, nuclear deterrence, and more. 

He was a classical child prodigy. With his capacity to memorize a randomly chosen list of names, addresses, and numbers from the telephone directory, John would entertain family visitors.

While there was a restriction on the number of Jewish students who were eligible to attend the University of Budapest as a student of excellency, he was admitted to study mathematics there in 1921.

While he was accepted, his father was afraid that mathematics was not practical at that time, so von Neumann enrolled at the University of Berlin to study chemistry. But, instead, he concentrated on mathematics. He even went to classes in statistical mechanics  given by Albert Einstein. At the end of the semester, he returned to take his final exams at the University of Budapest. After two years, he went to Zurich, there he earned his degree in chemical engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1925. In 1926 he received his doctorate in mathematics at the University of Budapest, with a thesis.

Von Neumann’s academic career was full of awards. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academia Nacional de Ciencias Exactas in Peru, Acamedia Nazionale dei Lincei in Italy, Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and Letters, Information Processing Hall of Fame and he had a lot of honorary degrees. "He not only showed the physicists, economists, and electrical engineers that formal mathematics could yield fresh breakthroughs in their fields, but made the enterprise of applying mathematics to real-world disciplines seem glamorous to the purest of young mathematicians." wrote Sylvia Nasar, Director's Visitor (2002-03).

John von Neumann was a massive admirer of parties and social events. His image of a serious man who wore his elegant gray suits was far from the silliest face he offered to his guests. He also was a great fan of ancient and medieval history, and of anything related to the Roman Empire. It was common to see him do a fun activity with his wife Clara, where one of his guests selected a page randomly from the huge library that the mathematician kept and he was able to recite the text from the memorized line.

Many were the weeks in which two parties were celebrated in the house owned by the von Neumann couple in Plicenton, where John was in his surroundings a perfect host and amused those present with a good number of dirty jokes or about Jews.

He was known as "the king of the parties". 

Contributions

John von Neumann was one of the most significant mathematicians in modern history whose legacy includes, among other inventions, computer architecture and self-replication machines. He has made significant theoretical contributions to subjects as diverse as mathematics, quantum mechanics, computational theory, and even economics and politics.

Perhaps his best-known facet is his role in the Manhattan Project Team was when he designed and produced the first nuclear bombs dropped on Japan at the end of the Second World War.

John von Neumann with the IAS machine, sometimes called the “von Neumann Machine”, stored in the the basement of Fuld Hall from 1942–1951 (Photo: Alan Richards)

He is also the creator of the Monte Carlo Method in the field of statistics, used to solve complex math equations and to acquire approximate solutions from the generation of random numbers. 

 Economics: He introduced the implementation of game theory and general equilibrium theory, which led him to conceive of the minimax theorem and to solve the problem that Léon Walras proposed at the end of the 19th century concerning the occurrence of balance states in models. 

First edition copy of Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944) by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern (Photo: Whitmore Rare Books).

In politics, he described himself as "violently anti-communist and much more militaristic than normal" which led him to work and to theorize the various aspects of the Cold War.

Von Neumann's architecture was first written by John von Neumann in 1945. Its computer architecture configuration consists of the Control Unit, the Arithmetic and Logic Unit (ALU), the Memory Unit, the Registers and the Inputs/Outputs. The Von Neumann architecture is based on the stored-program machine principle, which stores instruction data and program data in the same memory. This design is still used in most of the computers created today.