Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Otto von Bismarck | Alexander von Humboldt | Wernher von Braun | Carl Maria von Weber | Herbert von Karajan | Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher | John von Neumann | Lars von Trier | Ferdinand von Mueller | Paul von Hindenburg | Alexander von Humboldt Foundation | Heinrich von Kleist | Anne Sofie von Otter | Erich von Stroheim | Max von Sydow | Justus von Liebig | Hermann von Helmholtz | Franz von Papen | Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg | Carl von Clausewitz | Von Ryan's Express | Richard von Weizsäcker | Theodore von Kármán | Manfred von Richthofen | Erich von Däniken | Dita Von Teese | Albrecht von Haller | Carl Michael von Hausswolff | Alfred von Tirpitz |
His work on knot polynomials, with the discovery of what is now called the Jones polynomial, was from an unexpected direction with origins in the theory of von Neumann algebras, an area of analysis already much developed by Alain Connes.
It was not until the late 1960s, prompted partly by results in algebraic quantum field theory and quantum statistical mechanics due to the school of Rudolf Haag, that the more general non-tracial Tomita–Takesaki theory was developed, heralding a new era in the theory of von Neumann algebras.
The finite dimensional case differs from the general von Neumann algebras in that topology plays no role and they can be characterized using Wedderburn's theory of semisimple algebras.