Ryan Hendrix
2nd period
10-28-08
John von Neumann
John Neumann was born December 28, 1903 in Hungary. John was only six years old and could divide eight-digit numbers in his head. John studied chemistry in university in 1921 and received his diploma in Chemical Engineering in 1925. Von Neumann proved to be a brilliant young mathematician. Between 1922 and 1927, he produced eighteen major mathematical articles. Much of his early research can best be described as a response to Hilbert's mathematical program. In 1933, John became one of the original six professors in mathematics, which he kept until his death. John Von Neumann was considered by many colleagues to be the “smartest man” of the twentieth century and there are many anecdotes of his amazing mental abilities to support that belief. John von Neumann moved permanently to the United States in 1933 where he became a US citizen. He taught near Princeton, as a Professor of Mathematics at the newly formed Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) created by Abraham Flexner alongside such scientists and mathematicians as Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Hermann Weyl, and Wigner. During and after World War II, John von Neumann served as a consultant to the armed forces. His valuable contributions included a proposal of the implosion method for bringing nuclear fuel to explosion and his participation in the development of the hydrogen bomb. John specialized in ballistics, hydrodynamics, meteorology, game theory, and statistics. This work lead him to consider the use of mechanical devices for computation. Later on in World War II John served for several National Comities, helping them with his amazing ability of rapidly seeing through problems to their solution. John brought together the engineers at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering who were building the ENIAC, and later his own work on building the IAS machine. His ideas and work was copied to build “supercomputers” by the National Laboratories. It has been stated...