John von Neumann

His father was a banker with a doctorate in law, and the family held 18 rooms above the Kann-Heller offices in Budapest, one converted into a library. Governesses drilled the children in English, French, German and Italian, because Miksa Neumann held Hungarian alone would not carry them. In February 1913 the emperor ennobled him and the family took the appellation margittai, after a town it had no connection with, chosen to echo the mother's name. He entered the Lutheran gymnasium in 1914 and had published two serious papers by 19, the second superseding Cantor's definition of ordinal numbers. His father asked Theodore von Kármán to talk him out of mathematics. He took a chemical engineering degree at ETH Zurich and a Budapest doctorate in mathematics instead, finishing both in 1926.

Berlin made him its youngest Privatdozent at 24. Princeton took him in 1929 and the Institute for Advanced Study made him a founding professor in 1933. He built the axioms under quantum mechanics, proved the minimax theorem, and published Theory of Games and Economic Behavior with Oskar Morgenstern in 1944, a front-page New York Times story. At Los Alamos he designed the explosive lenses that squeezed the plutonium core of the Nagasaki bomb. He circulated an unfinished First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, describing a machine that kept program and data in one memory. The circulation voided Eckert and Mauchly's patent claims and the design took his name. He built the Princeton machine, ran the first numerical weather forecast on ENIAC with Jule Charney, and worked out a self-reproducing automaton before anyone knew the shape of DNA.

He sat on the committee that chose the Japanese cities, and computed the altitude at which the bombs should go off to throw the shock wave furthest. Kyoto was his first choice, seconded by General Groves and struck out by Secretary Stimson. He watched Trinity and estimated five kilotons at a blast of 20 to 22. Afterward he became the most trusted scientist at the Pentagon, chaired the committees behind the Atlas and Titan missiles, told a Senate committee he was violently anti-communist and much more militaristic than the norm, and filed a 1946 hydrogen-bomb patent with Klaus Fuchs, who passed it to Moscow. In 1955 a mass appeared near his collarbone. Sources still disagree on where the cancer began, and the radiation at Los Alamos may have caused it.

He asked for a priest and reached for Pascal's wager, and by the priest's own account got no comfort from the last rites: he was terrified of dying and stayed terrified. He died at Walter Reed on February 8, 1957, aged 53, and lies in Princeton Cemetery. Klára Dán, who had programmed both ENIAC and MANIAC, wrote the preface to the book he left unfinished. The economics he did in passing underwrites three later Nobel Prizes. His name is fixed to an architecture that Eckert and Mauchly built, to a crater, to a self-replicating probe nobody has launched, and to the ordinary fact that the machine you are reading this on keeps its instructions where it keeps its data.

John von Neumann's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics book
  The Hilbert-space formulation the field still uses 1932
• Theory of Games and Economic Behavior book
  With Oskar Morgenstern. The New York Times put it on the front page 1944
• The Fat Man explosive lenses invention
  His calculations showed implosion would work within five percent of spherical symmetry 1945
• First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC article
  Unfinished, circulated anyway, and still the standard description of a stored-program computer 1945
• The IAS machine invention
  He designed it, raised the money and had it built at Princeton. Copies were made worldwide 1952
• The Computer and the Brain book
  Ninety-six pages, unfinished at his death, published with a preface by his wife 1958

• February 20, 1913 aged 9 Franz Joseph ennobles his father and the family becomes margittai The coat of arms carried three marguerites, for his mother Margit.
• 1926 aged ~23 Takes a chemical engineering degree and a mathematics doctorate in the same year The doctorate axiomatized Cantor's set theory. The engineering degree was his father's idea.
• 1933 aged ~30 Becomes a founding professor at the Institute for Advanced Study
• 1937 aged ~34 Naturalized, and immediately rejected by the Army Reserve for his age
• June 30, 1945 aged 41 Circulates the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC The premature distribution nullified Eckert and Mauchly's patent claims.
• July 16, 1945 aged 41 Watches the Trinity test and guesses five kilotons The yield was 20 to 22. His 1944 papers had introduced the word kiloton.
• 1950 aged ~47 Runs the first numerical weather forecast, on ENIAC, with Jule Charney
• 1955 aged ~52 Appointed to the Atomic Energy Commission, and diagnosed with cancer A mass near the collarbone turned out to be metastatic.
• February 8, 1957 aged 53 Dies at Walter Reed, aged 53

• J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–1967
  Theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project and became known as the father of the atomic bomb. Los Alamos colleague
• Edward Teller 1908–2003
  Physicist and advocate of the hydrogen bomb whose work and policy influence shaped Cold War science and defense. hydrogen bomb ally
• J. Presper Eckert 1919–1995
  Co-inventor of ENIAC and pioneer of electronic computing alongside John Mauchly. patent claims voided by his report
• John Mauchly 1907–1980
  Co-inventor of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. patent claims voided by his report
• Kurt Gödel 1906–1978
  Proved the incompleteness theorems and spent his later career at the Institute for Advanced Study. Princeton colleague
• John Forbes Nash Jr. 1928–2015
  Formulated the Nash equilibrium and proved major results in differential geometry. extended his game theory