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Among the geniuses of the 20th century, there are several outstanding figures: Einstein, Turing, Hawking, and there is no doubt that von Neumann is one of them, although many do not know who he is.
Johann von Neumann was one of the most influential figures of the 20th century. He may have influenced your life more directly than any of the great minds of the past 150 years, and his research touches on everything from quantum mechanics to climate science.
Von Neumann's greatest contribution was to modern computers, he took the excellent theoretical framework laid by Turing and actually came up with the architecture that powers nearly all digital computers: the von Neumann architecture.
More controversially, von Neumann made significant contributions to the Manhattan Project during World War II, including refining the design of the atomic bomb itself and mechanisms critical to its function.
Unlike some of the other veterans of the Manhattan Project, von Neumann never regretted his role in the program, and even promoted a policy of "death together" during the Cold War.
Johann von Neumann was a complex figure, to say the least, but he was virtually unrivaled in the 20th century, and arguably more responsible for the modern world than any of his contemporaries.
child prodigy
Johann von Neumann was born on December 28, 1903 in Budapest, Hungary. Von Neumann's father was a banker, his mother was the daughter of an Austro-Hungarian nobleman, and his parents were wealthy and respected.
In 1913, Emperor Franz Joseph of the Austro-Hungarian Empire granted von Neumann's father a nobility and gave the family the hereditary title "Magita", now the Romanian Magita.
The title was purely honorary, as the family had no connection to the place, but it was something von Neumann would hold on to throughout his life.
Young von Neumann was considered a true child prodigy among his peers, especially in mathematics. He is thought to have a photographic memory, which helped him absorb a great deal of knowledge from a very early age.
Von Neumann at 11 with cousin Katalin Alcsuti
At the age of six, he started dividing two eight-digit numbers in his head, and by the age of eight he had mastered calculus.
His father believed that all his children needed to speak a major European language other than their native Hungarian, so von Neumann studied English, French, Italian and German.
As a child, he also had a deep interest in history and read the entire 46-volume treatise "General History" by the German historian Wilhelm Onken.
German historian Wilhelm Onken
Encouraged by his teachers, von Neumann excelled in his studies, but his father did not believe that a career as a mathematician would bring financial benefits.
Instead, von Neumann and his father agreed that von Neumann would pursue a career in chemical engineering, and he went to study in Berlin at the age of 17 and later in Zurich.
Chemistry seems to be one of the few areas in which von Neumann was not interested, although he did get a Zurich diploma in chemical engineering, along with a PhD in mathematics.
early career
John von Neumann published papers very early, starting at the age of 20 when he wrote a paper defining ordinal numbers, which is still the definition we use today. He wrote his doctoral thesis on set theory and made several contributions to the field during his lifetime.
By 1927, von Neumann had published 12 famous mathematical papers. By 1929, he had published 32 works, writing a lot of important work at the rate of about one academic paper a month.
In 1928 he became a private teacher at the University of Berlin, the youngest person to hold this position in the history of the University of Berlin. This position enabled him to lecture at the university until 1929 when he became a private teacher at the University of Hamburg.
Von Neumann converted to Catholicism after his father died in 1929. On New Year's Day 1930, Johan von Neumann married Marietta Covici, an economics student at the University of Budapest, with whom he gave birth to his only child, Marina, in 1935.
While von Neumann seemed destined for a promising career at the German Academy of Sciences, in October 1929 he was offered a position at Princeton University in New Jersey, which he eventually accepted, with his wife in 1930. Go to America together.
Immigrate to America
By 1933, John von Neumann was one of the original six professors of mathematics at the newly formed Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a post he would also serve for the rest of his life.
When he moved to New Jersey, like many American immigrants before him, von Neumann Anglicized his Hungarian name (from Magitay Neumann Janos to John von Neumann Iman, using the German-style hereditary title).
In 1937 he divorced his wife and the following year von Neumann remarried, this time with Clara Dan, whom he first met in Budapest during his last visit to Hungary before World War II · Dan.
In 1937, von Neumann became a U.S. citizen, and in 1939 his mother, siblings, and in-laws all immigrated to the United States (his father had died earlier).
The War Years and the Manhattan Project
One of Johann von Neumann's most important contributions to history was his study of the Manhattan Project during World War II.
As always, von Neumann couldn't leave the mathematical challenge unsolved, one of the more difficult problems being how to simulate the effects of an explosion.
Von Neumann devoted himself to these questions in the 1930s and became an expert in the field. If he has a speciality, it should be a mathematical problem in the field of Shaped Charges (used for blasting), which are used to control and guide the energy of explosions.
This has led him to considerable regular consultations with the US military, especially the US Navy. When the Manhattan Project began work in the early 1940s, von Neumann was recruited for his expertise.
In 1943, von Neumann had the most significant and lasting impact on the Manhattan Project.
member of the manhattan project
At the time, the Los Alamos laboratory, which designed the atomic bomb, found that plutonium-239, one of the fissile materials used in the project, was incompatible with the laboratory's working bomb design.
The lab's physicist Seth Niedermeier has been working on a self-contained implosion-type bomb design that is promising, but not considered feasible by many.
Animation of the nuclear bomb implosion mechanism
To detonate a nuclear explosion, a runaway fission chain reaction needs to be initiated in the bomb's reactants. The speed of chain reactions is exponential, so controlling the explosion long enough to allow enough fissile material to carry out the desired reaction is a major challenge.
An implosion bomb requires more sophisticated controls to produce a response, but it also doesn't require as much material as the gun-type bomb design developed at Los Alamos.
Implosion-type devices use a series of controlled conventional explosions to compress the fission reactants in their core.
Under this pressure, the fissile material rapidly begins a nuclear fission chain reaction, held in place by the force of the implosion and allowing more of the fissile material to release its energy.
Controlling these explosions to produce the precise implosion force to produce the desired response was a great challenge, and von Neumann embraced it with great enthusiasm.
He believes that by using less spherical material and properly compressing it with implosion force, a more efficient explosion could be produced, using as much fissile material as possible.
He was often one of the few who advocated the implosion method, and eventually worked out a mathematical formula showing that the method was achievable if the implosion could preserve the spherical geometry with at least 95 percent accuracy.
Von Neumann also calculated that the effectiveness of the explosion would increase if it detonated some distance above the target, rather than when it hit the ground.
This greatly increased the lethality of the atomic bomb and also reduced the amount of dust produced by the explosion.
Afterwards, von Neumann was selected as part of a team of scientific advisors who consulted the military on possible targets for the bomb.
Von Neumann suggested targeting Kyoto, Japan, since its destruction as a cultural capital might be enough to force a quick end to the war.
He wasn't alone in making the proposal, but Secretary of War Henry Stimson rejected the idea of targeting Kyoto, where Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen because of its many historic buildings and important religious sites.
Von Neumann was present during the Trinity test on July 16, 1945, when the first atomic weapon was detonated. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, Japan surrendered and World War II ended.
Trinity Test
Unlike some of his contemporaries in the Manhattan Project, von Neumann does not seem to have any reflective pain, regret, or even a shred of doubt about his work on the atomic bomb.
In fact, von Neumann was one of the strongest proponents of the development of nuclear weapons and the theory of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) as the only way to prevent another catastrophic world war.
The "lightweight" idea of nuclear weapons
Like many Americans in the early postwar period, von Neumann worried that the United States was falling behind the Soviet Union in the development of nuclear weapons. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, the idea of using strategic bombers to drop more atomic bombs on the enemy was gradually replaced by new rocket technology.
Von Neumann believed that missiles were the future of nuclear weapons, and because of his contacts with German scientists involved in the development of Soviet weapons, he knew that the Soviets shared his views on the issue.
The arms race has begun. The United States and the Soviet Union have made hydrogen bombs smaller and smaller, which can be loaded into the warheads of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Von Neumann actively worked for the United States and worked hard to narrow the "missile gap" with the Soviet Union.
After the war, von Neumann served on the Atomic Energy Commission, advising governments and the military on nuclear technology development and strategy, and is widely credited as the architect of the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) doctrine, which was used during the Cold War. During this period, it was indeed adopted by the government and became the de facto US national policy.
Build the first real computer
Von Neumann met Alan Turing in the early 1930s while Turing was doing his Ph.D. at Princeton. In 1937, Turing published the landmark paper "On Computable Numbers", which laid the theoretical foundation of modern computing.
Von Neumann quickly recognized the importance of Turing's discovery and drove the development of computer science in the 1930s. At Princeton University, he and Turing had a long discussion around the idea of artificial intelligence.
As a mathematician, von Neumann studied computer science from a more abstract perspective, also because in the 1930s there were no real working computers.
After the end of World War II, this situation changed quickly.
Von Neumann was deeply involved in the development of the first programmable electronic computer, "ENIAC," capable of recognizing and deciding on other sets of data manipulation rules than the one originally used. It was von Neumann who modified ENIAC to operate as a stored program machine.
The latter makes possible the modern programs that we understand today. Von Neumann himself wrote several of the first programs that ran on ENIAC and used them to simulate parts of the Atomic Energy Commission's nuclear weapons research.
Without a doubt, von Neumann's most enduring contributions to the field of computer science are two fundamental concepts used in every computer running today: the von Neumann architecture and the concept of stored programs.
Von Neumann architecture deals with how the physical electronic circuits that make up a computer are organized. Computers built in this way are called "von Neumann machines". The architecture consists of an arithmetic and logic unit (ALU), a control unit, and temporary memory registers, which together make up the central processing unit (CPU).
The CPU is connected to the memory unit, which contains all the data that will be processed and manipulated by the CPU. The CPU is also connected to input and output devices to change data as needed, and to retrieve the results of running programs.
Since von Neumann proposed this architecture in 1945, it remains essentially the way most general-purpose computers operate today, with little change.
Another major innovation is related to the von Neumann architecture, the concept of a stored program, that is, the data that is manipulated or processed, and the programs that describe how to manipulate and process that data, are stored in the computer's memory.
These two intertwined innovations realized the theoretical framework of Turing machines, effectively turning them into machines that could be used to calculate data on wages, artillery trajectories, games, the Internet, and just about everything.
Outstanding Contributions to Other Fields
In addition to mathematics and computer science, von Neumann made significant contributions to several other fields throughout his life.
In his early career, von Neumann made significant contributions to the emerging field of quantum mechanics.
In 1932, he and Paul Dirac published the Dirac-von Neumann axioms in the book Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, the first complete mathematical framework in the field. In this book, he also proposed a formal system of quantum logic, the first of its kind.
Von Neumann also established game theory as a rigorous mathematical discipline, which no doubt influenced his later work on geopolitical strategy on MAD theory.
Von Neumann's game theory contains the idea that, in a broad class of games, it is always possible to find an equilibrium from which no player should unilaterally deviate.
In the life sciences, von Neumann conducted a thorough mathematical analysis of the self-replication of cellular automata, mainly the relationship between the constructor, the thing being constructed, and the blueprint that the constructor follows to construct the thing in question. The analysis describes a self-replicating machine that was designed in the 1940s without the use of a computer.
Von Neumann's mathematical prowess also benefited climate science. In 1950 he wrote the first climate modelling program and made the world's first weather forecast using numerical data using ENIAC.
von Neumann predicted that global warming was the result of human activity, writing in 1955:
"The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by industrial burning of coal and oil may have altered the composition of the atmosphere sufficiently to cause a general global warming of about 1 degree Fahrenheit."
Von Neumann is also credited with being the first to describe the "technological singularity". Von Neumann's friend Stan Ulam later described a conversation with him that sounds prescient today.
Stan Ulam, Richard Feynman and von Neumann together
Ulam recalls: “One conversation centered on accelerating technological progress and changes in the human way of life led us to see some essential singularities in human history. Once those singularities were transcended, what we know as Human affairs will not be able to continue."
The death of von Neumann, and his glorious legacy
In 1955, von Neumann was diagnosed with cancer when he saw a doctor with a piece of flesh growing on his collarbone, but he didn't fully accept the fact.
Von Neumann is known to be terrified of the coming end. His lifelong friend Eugene Wigner wrote:
"When von Neumann realized that he was terminally ill, his logic forced him to realize that he was about to cease to exist and therefore no longer have a mind... It was heartbreaking to witness this firsthand, all hope was lost. Disappeared, and the fate to come, though unacceptable, is inevitable."
Von Neumann's condition continued to deteriorate in 1956, and he was eventually admitted to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. To prevent leaks, the military imposed special security measures on him.
Von Neumann invited a Catholic priest to consult on his deathbed, and he accepted the arrangements for his end-of-life ceremonies. But the priest himself said that von Neumann did not appear to be taking comfort from the ceremony.
On February 8, 1957, von Neumann died of cancer at the age of 53 and was buried in Princeton Cemetery, New Jersey.
There has been debate as to whether von Neumann's cancer was related to the radiation he suffered during the Manhattan Project, but there is no dispute that humanity has prematurely lost one of the greatest scientific giants of our time.
PR Halmos, von Neumann's assistant, wrote in 1973:
"There are two kinds of human heroes: those who are like all of us, but more similar, and those that clearly have some 'superhuman' qualities.
We can all run, some of us can run a mile in less than 4 minutes. But there are some things that most of us will never be able to do in our lifetime. Von Neumann's great contribution benefits all mankind. We can think more or less clearly at some point, but von Neumann's clarity was consistently orders of magnitude higher than most of us. "
Von Neumann's talent is unquestioned, although his legacy, especially his contributions to nuclear weapons, is more complex than his friends and admirers would like to admit.
Regardless of what we ultimately think about von Neumann and his achievements, we can safely say that it is unlikely that he will have such a significant impact on human history in the next generation or even generations. of people.
Original link:
https://interestingengineering.com/john-von-neumann-human-the-computer-behind-project-manhattan
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