John Von Neumann

German Physicist

1903-1957

Mathematician, born in Budapest. He escaped from Hungary during the communist regime (1919), studied at Berlin and Zürich, and emigrated to the USA in 1933, to join the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Equally at home in pure and applied mathematics, he wrote a major work on quantum mechanics (1932), which led him to a new axiomatic foundation for set theory, and participated in the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos during World War II, providing a mathematical treatment of shock waves. His mathematical work on high-speed calculations for H-bomb development contributed to the development of computers, and he also introduced game theory (1944), which was a major influence on economics.

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