John von Neumann

Although not a trained physicist, John von Neumann contributed to quantum mechanics by describing it in an elegant way, more attractive than Heisenberg's method (Rédei 2001). His success in the field, and other fields, was his ability to immerse himself in the fields rather than simply approach it from a mathematical standpoint. "[T]he war introduced me to great parts of mathematical physics and applied mathematics which I had neglected before, and I feel that I received intellectually a good deal more than I gave." -John von Neumann in a letter to the Commissioner of the US Atomic Energy Commission (Rédei 2005) Commissioner of the US Atomic Energy Commission. APA (American Psychological Assoc.) Hargittai, B., & Hargittai, I. (2016). Wisdom Of The Martians Of Science: In Their Own Words With Commentaries. Singapore: World Scientific. MLA (Modern Language Assoc.) Hargittai, Balazs and István Hargittai. Wisdom of the Martians of Science: In Thei...

 John von Neumann left his mark on many fields of mathematics, from set theory, to operator algebra, unbounded operators and game theory. His Ph.D. focused on the axiomatization of set theory . Further, he demonstrated two methods in which to avoid Russell's Paradox in set theory. Von Neumann also highly respected Kurt Gödel, the mathematician known for his incompleteness theorems. Soon after Gödel announced his first theorem, von Neumann independently discovered the second. In correspondence between them, Gödel told him that he had already established that discovery but had yet to publish, so von Neumann vowed not to publish the proof (Rédei, 2005). As you have established the theorem on the unprovability of consistency as a natural continuation and deepening of your earlier results, I clearly won't publish on this subject. -John von Neumann, November 29, 1930 Von Neumann algebras were some of his contributions to operator algebra . T...

John von Neumann was born in Budapest in 1903. Von Neumann was gifted with talents in math and science from an early age and achieved a PhD in mathematics at age 22 with other studies in chemistry and physics and electrical engineering. He soon started teaching at the University of Berlin and within four years had published 12 papers. With Europe on the brink of WWII, in 1937 von Neumann became a citizen of the United States and attempted to become a lieutenant in the Army under the ordinance department. Fortunately for history, he was denied due to his age. As the US became involved in the war, von Neumann became one of their foremost scientists involved in explosives. He was involved with shaped charges for torpedoes and antitank weapons and eventually joined the Manhattan Project. There is an old anecdote about someone at the Manhattan Project suggesting the impressive Hungarian scientists there had come from Mars and disguised themselves by speaking Hungarian. Von ...