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8 unusual facts about John von Neumann


Abraham Flexner

With Louis Bamberger, Flexner founded the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, heading it from 1930 to 1939 and overseeing a faculty that included Kurt Gödel and John von Neumann.

David L. Downie

Dr. Whitman is the daughter of Marina von Neumann Whitman, the noted economist, and Robert Freeman Whitman, professor emeritus of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and the granddaughter of John von Neumann, one of the foremost mathematicians of the 20th century.

History of entropy

In 1949, however, when Shannon had been working on his equations for some time, he happened to visit the mathematician John von Neumann.

Miklós Sugár

1991, John von Neumann Society for Competition of Electroacoustic (3 awards)

Universal Turing machine

This model is considered by some (for example, Martin Davis (2000)) to be the origin of the stored program computer—used by John von Neumann (1946) for the "Electronic Computing Instrument" that now bears von Neumann's name: the von Neumann architecture.

Davis makes a persuasive argument that Turing's conception of what is now known as "the stored-program computer", of placing the "action table"—the instructions for the machine—in the same "memory" as the input data, strongly influenced John von Neumann's conception of the first American discrete-symbol (as opposed to analog) computer—the EDVAC.

Von Neumann cellular automaton

Von Neumann cellular automata are the original expression of cellular automata, the development of which were prompted by suggestions made to John von Neumann by his close friend and fellow mathematician Stanislaw Ulam.

William Poundstone

Prisoner's Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb (1992)


Bruce Gilchrist

That same year, with a special interest in calculating methods for weather forecasting, and with funding arranged by the mathematician John von Neumann, he joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey supported on United States Smith-Mundt and Fulbright programs.

Bruria Kaufman

She is known for contributions to Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, to statistical physics, where she used applied spinor analysis to rederive the result of Lars Onsager on the partition function of the two-dimensional Ising Model, and to the study of the Mössbauer effect, on which she collaborated with John von Neumann and Harry Lipkin.

Charlotte Bach

In 1968, Hajdu adopted the new role of Dr. Charlotte Bach, a supposed former lecturer at Budapest's Eötvös Loránd University, whose actual alumni included the philosophers Michael and Karl Polanyi and the mathematician John von Neumann.

Forman S. Acton

Throughout his career, Acton has worked with many notable computer scientists and engineers, including John von Neumann, John Tukey, and John Mauchly.

Harold Garfinkel

This brought him in contact with some of the most prominent scholars of the day in the behavioral, informational, and social sciences including: Gregory Bateson, Kenneth Burke, Paul Lazarsfeld, Frederick Mosteller, Philip Selznick, Herbert A. Simon, and John von Neumann.

Hilbrand J. Groenewold

After a visit to Cambridge to interact with John von Neumann (1934-5) on the links between classical and quantum mechanics, and a checkered career working with Frits Zernike in Groningen, then Leiden, the Hague, De Bilt, and several addresses in the North of Holland during World War II, he earned his Ph.D. degree in 1946, under the tutelage of Léon Rosenfeld at Utrecht University.

History of numerical weather prediction

The first successful numerical prediction was performed using the ENIAC digital computer in 1950 by a team composed of American meteorologists Jule Charney, Philip Thompson, Larry Gates, and Norwegian meteorologist Ragnar Fjørtoft and applied mathematician John von Neumann.

Sergey Yablonsky

Yablonsky and his students were ones of the first in the world to raise the issues of potentially inherent unavoidability of the brute force search for some problems, the precursor of the P = NP problem, though Gödel's letter to von Neumann, dated 20 March 1956 and discovered in 1988, may have preceded them.

Thelma Estrin

They moved to Princeton, New Jersey, in the early 1950s, where Gerald joined the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and became associated with the group that formed around John von Neumann.

Tit for tat

Evolutionary game theory, derived from the mathematical theories formalised by von Neumann and Morgenstern (1953), was first devised by Maynard Smith (1972) and explored further in bird behaviour by Robert Hinde.


see also