- Person
- John von Neumann
- Lived
- 1903–1957
- Field
- Mathematics & computing
- From
- Hungarian-American
The story
In the summer of 1944 John von Neumann met Herman Goldstine of the ENIAC project and learned about the electronic computer being built in Philadelphia. The following year he wrote the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, describing a stored-program computer, and he then set out to build one himself.
At the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton he arranged the financing, and from 1946 a small team constructed the IAS machine, with components designed and built at the nearby RCA research laboratory. Goldstine became assistant director and later director of the project, the ENIAC engineer Arthur Burks joined him, and Julian Bigelow was hired as chief engineer in 1946.
The machine was in limited operation in the summer of 1951 and fully working by June 1952. It used 1,700 vacuum tubes, had a memory of 1,024 forty-bit words and was the first binary computer to process all the bits of a word in parallel. It ran until 1958 and is now in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
Crucially, its plans were widely distributed to any schools, businesses or companies interested in computing. Laboratories around the world used them to build their own computers on the same plan, among them JOHNNIAC at RAND, ILLIAC at Illinois, MANIAC at Los Alamos, BESK in Stockholm, BESM in Moscow, DASK in Copenhagen and SILLIAC in Sydney.
The machine also shaped commercial computing. The IBM 701, of which 19 were installed, is counted among the IAS-derived machines; von Neumann advised on its design, recommending that it include a magnetic drum, and its faster successor, the IBM 704, became a commercial success. Through these machines the logic he described spread into the computer industry, and the general design is still known as the von Neumann architecture, though others helped conceive and build it.
Why it matters
Openly sharing the IAS design spread modern computing rapidly across universities and nations in the 1950s.
About John von Neumann
Budapest-born mathematician whose 1945 EDVAC report set out the stored-program design behind almost every computer, and who helped found game theory and modern quantum mechanics.
More about John von Neumann
- Von Neumann warned of CO2 warming in 1955In 1955 John von Neumann noted that carbon dioxide from burning coal and oil might already have changed the atmosphere enough to cause general warming.
- Von Neumann's ergodic theorem earned 'immortality'John von Neumann's 1932 papers on ergodic theory were so important that Paul Halmos said they alone would have guaranteed him mathematical immortality.
- Von Neumann launched computer weather forecastingIn 1950 John von Neumann and Jule Charney used ENIAC to make the first numerical weather forecasts; in 1955 routine computer forecasting began in the US.
- John von Neumann founded game theoryJohn von Neumann proved the minimax theorem in 1928 and, with Oskar Morgenstern, published Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1944, founding game theory.
- John von Neumann invented merge sort in 1945In 1945 John von Neumann invented merge sort, one of the most widely used methods for putting data in order, in what Donald Knuth called his first computer program.
- Von Neumann helped create the Monte Carlo methodWith Stanislaw Ulam, John von Neumann helped develop the Monte Carlo method, using random numbers on computers to solve problems too complex for direct calculation.
- Von Neumann gave quantum mechanics its mathematicsIn his 1932 book Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, John von Neumann set out the first rigorous mathematical framework for quantum theory.
- Von Neumann designed a machine that copies itselfIn the late 1940s John von Neumann designed a self-reproducing 'universal constructor' and, with Stanislaw Ulam, created the field of cellular automata.
- John von Neumann wrote the blueprint for modern computersJohn von Neumann's 1945 report on the EDVAC gave the first published description of the stored-program computer, the design behind almost every computer since.
Sources
- IAS machine Wikipedia
- John von Neumann Wikipedia
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