If you know even a little about computer design you will have come across the term "Von Neumann architecture" probably in the context of what a big problem it is and how we need something better to make computers work faster. For this reason you may think that Von Neumann got it wrong but in fact in all the years that have passed no-one has come up with a more generally acceptable way of organising a computer.

Not only did Von Neumann come up with the only sensible organisation for a modern computer, he pioneered many of the great ideas of AI, game theory and many biological aspects of computing - yet he was a mathematician. I have to admit that Von Neumann is a hero of mine. He was the sort of mathematician who managed to use his mathematics to understand the way things worked.

John Von Neumann, 1903-1957

Johann von Neumann was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1903. He was always interested in science and studied chemistry and then mathematics at the University of Berlin, and eventually at the University of Budapest. He taught at a number of German universities before in 1930 accepting a position at Princeton University as a guest lecturer for one year - he stayed. He became a citizen of the USA and affectionately known as Johnny Von Neumann from then on.

Poker and beyond

During the 1920 and 30 he worked on what you can only call pure maths but with hindsight it is possible to see how it would lead on to computing - a subject that didn't even exist at the time!

He was interested in randomness, logic and he recast the mathematics of quantum mechanics into the nice neat form that we know today. For example, even if Von Neumann had made no further contributions to computing he would be remembered for his study of poker.. No really, in 1928 he started the subject of game theory off. Later to be rolled out in an even more complete form in a book with Oscar Morgenstern published in 1945. Game theory isn't about playing games of pure logic like chess or noughts and crosses but about games where human psychology comes into play. Games like poker where bluffing may not be entirely logical but it often works.

Von Neumann's theory of such games can be seen as making a start on the difficult job of analysing complex human behaviour with twin motive or understanding it better and, given a computer, automating it. Game theory has been adopted by subjects as diverse as psychology, economics and AI. If he had done nothing else this would have been sufficient to establish his reputation. I like the image of Von Neumann staying up late into the night playing poker in the cause of further study! You can tell he was made of the right stuff!

He then became interested in problems in applied mathematics - perhaps as a response to the threat of war. In 1943 defence work occupied most of his time as he joined the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. This was the secret project to build the atomic bomb and while Von Neumann wasn't a physicist he knew how to work out the difficult sums needed to understand fission. His theoretical work on randomness suggested to him simulation methods that would give the answers everyone was looking for - but they needed some way of doing lots of simple calculations very rapidly. Today we would immediately think "computer" but that wasn't the case in 1945.

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