About

John von Neumann is the Father of the Modern Computer. His original name is Janos von Neumann. He was called Jancsi as a child, a informal form of the name Janos, then later he was called Johnny in the United States. He was the first born son of Neumann Miksa and Kann Margit. As an adult, he add von to his surname; the hereditary title had been granted his father in 1913.

Born: December 28, 1903, Budapest, Hungary
Died: February 8, 1957, Washington, D.C., United States
Awards: Enrico Fermi Award, Bôcher Memorial Prize
Spouse: Klara Dan von Neumann (m. 1938–1957), Mariette Kövesi (m. 1930–1937)

At a very young age, Von Neumann was interested in math, the nature of numbers and the logic of the world around him. Von Neumann distinguished himself from his peers in childhood for having a photographic memory, being able to memorize and recite back a page out of a phone book in a few minutes. Science, history, and psychology were among his many interests; he succeeded in every academic subject in school. He received his early education in Budapest, under the tutelage of M. Fekete, with whom he published his first paper at the age of 18. Entering the University of Budapest in 1921, he studied Chemistry, moving his base of studies to both Berlin and Zurich before receiving his diploma in 1925 in Chemical Engineering. He returned to his first love of mathematics in completing his doctoral degree in 1928. In 1929, he was offered a job at Princeton. Upon marrying his fiancee, Mariette Kovesi, whom he had known since his early childhood. Nuemann moved to the U.S. (Agnostic most of his life, Von Neumann accepted his wife's Catholic faith for the marriage, though not taking it very seriously.) In 1935, Mariette gave birth to Von Neumann's daughter, Marina. Two years later, Mariette left Von Neumann for J. B. Kuper, a physicist. Within a year of his divorce, Von Neumann began an affair with Klari Dan, his childhood sweetheart, who was willing to leave her husband for him. Von Neumann is commonly described as a practical joker and always the life of the party. John and Klara held a party every week or so, creating a kind of salon at their house. Von Neumann used his phenomenal memory to compile an immense library of jokes which he used to liven up a conversation. Von Neumann loved games and toys, which probably contributed in great part to his work in Game Theory.

Von Neumann computers are the ancestors of today's desktop and laptop PCs. The principal feature of a Von Neumann computer is that the program and any data are both stored together, usually in a slow-to-access storage medium such as a hard disk, and transferred as required to a faster, and more volatile storage medium (RAM) for execution or processing by a central processing unit (CPU). Since this how practically all present day computers work, the term "Von Neumann architecture" is rarely used now, but it was in common parlance in the computing profession through to the early 1970s. When Von Neumann proposed this architecture in 1945, it was an extreme idea. Prior to then, programs were viewed as essentially part of the machine, and hence different from the data the machine operated on. A common approach was to input the program by some physical means, such as wiring a plugboard, and then feeding in the data for the program to act upon. In 1945, in his first draft of a report on the EDVAC [a planned successor machine to the ENIAC( Electronic Numerical Integrator Analyzer and Computer), one of the first American computers], von Neumann proposed the stored program concept. The idea grew out of discussions he had with several other computer pioneers, among them J. Presper Eckert, John Mauchly, Arthur Burks, and Hermann Goldstine, who were working on plans for the EDVAC. What was to become known as the von Neumann architecture was subsequently spelled out more fully in a 1946 paper, written by von Neumann, Burks and Goldstine, titled "Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument." Von Neumann computers have some disadvantage. In particular, they carry out instructions one after another, in a single linear sequence, and they spend a lot of time moving data to and from the memory. This slows the computer , a problem called the von Neumann bottleneck. One way to circumvent the von Neumann bottleneck is to build the computer so it performs operations in parallel (so-called parallel processing). Another common trick is to separate the bus into two or more busses, one for instructions, another for data. But such modifications don't really amount to much more than variations of the original architecture. To all intents and purposes, the PC on your desk today is a von Neumann machine. The EDVAC computer, when it was finally constructed in 1952, followed von Neumann's design, but the first von Neumann computer to be constructed and operated was the Manchester Mark I, designed and built at Manchester University in England, which ran its first program in 1948. It had a 96 word memory, and executed an instruction in 1.2 milliseconds. Although such a performance was viewed as phenomenal at the time, in today's "MIPS" terminology -- millions of instructions per second -- the Mark I would rank at a painfully slow 0.00083 MIPS. By contrast, IBM's G5 chip, which powers the latest Macintosh PCs, hums along at 1,000 MIPS, over a million times faster.