John von Neumann

On January 1, 1930, von Neumann married Mariette Kövesi, who had studied economics at Budapest University. Soon after that, they shifted to the U.S.A, where their only child, Marina von Neumann Whitman, was born. The couple divorced in 1937.

Marina later grew up to be noted economist. She is now a Professor of Business Administration and Public Policy at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business as well as The Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

In October 1938, von Neumann married Klara Dan, a scientist, and a pioneering computer programmer. The couple did not have any children. They remained married until his death in 1957.

John von Neumann was born as Neumann János Lajos on December 28, 1903 into an affluent family in Budapest. His father, Miksa Neumann, was a banker. His mother, Kann Margit, came from a prosperous merchant family. He had two younger brothers, Michael and Nicholas.

Born a child prodigy, he could mentally divide and multiply multi-digit numbers from the age of six and became familiar with differential and integral calculus by the age of eight. Besides, he received lessons in Hungarian, English, French, German and Italian while studying at home under a governess.

In 1911, János was admitted to Fasori Evangélikus Gimnázium. Here his mathematical talent was quickly spotted by his teacher. Since his father insisted that he studied in grades appropriate to his age, additional especial tuitions were arranged for him to train him in fields in which he displayed an aptitude.

Neumann completed his education at the gymnasium in 1921. Although he wanted to study mathematics his father convinced him to study chemical engineering because it had better prospects. With that aim, he enrolled at the University of Berlin in 1921 for a two-year course in chemistry.

Simultaneously, he also enrolled at the University of Budapest with mathematics; but did not attend the classes there. Sometime now, he published two major mathematical papers.

In 1928, Neumann started his career as a privatdozent at the University of Berlin. In the same year, he published ‘ZurTheorie der Gesellschaftsspiele’ (On the Theory of Parlor Games), an important paper in the field of game theory.

All along, he kept on working with Hilbert. The work culminated into his first major book, ‘The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics’; however, it was published much later in 1932.

In 1929, Neumann shifted to University of Hamburg as privatdozent because it offered better scope to become a tenured professor. However, he did not continue there for long.

In October 1929, he was invited to lecture on quantum theory at the Princeton University in New Jersey, USA. He accepted the offer; but since he was engaged to be married, he first went to Budapest to complete the ceremony and then moved to USA with his wife.

In 1930, Neumann became a visiting lecturer at Princeton University. Some time now, he started working on the theory of rings of operators with the aim of developing a mathematical technique suitable for quantum phenomenon. The work took almost a decade to finish and is now known as ‘von Neumann algebras’.

In 1931, he was appointed a full professor. He now began to write a series of articles in which he made foundational contributions to quasi ergodic theory.

However, as a professor of mathematics, he was not very popular with the students. This was because they could not keep up with him and found it hard to follow his fluid lines of thought. He wrote too quickly and rubbed it off before his students could copy it.

Contrarily, he was able to convey the complicated ideas in physics much more easily. After a talk, his students always returned with the feeling that the problem was actually very simple.

In 1933, the Institute of Advance Study was established at Princeton. Neumann became one of the six original Professors in Mathematics at the institute, a position he maintained throughout his life. In the same year, he also became co-editor of the ‘Annals of Mathematics.’