Hungarian Intellectual Property Office

JÁNOS NEUMANN (1903 - 1957)

His full name was János Lajos Margittai Neumann, internationally known as John von Neumann. He excelled at mathematics in his youth, and his teachers (László Rátz and József Kürschák) helped to develop his capacities further. He studied engineering and science simultaneously at the universities in Budapest, then obtained a diploma in Berlin. He lectured at German universities, then worked in Princeton as visiting lecturer with Einstein, Weyl and Jenő Wigner. He was engaged in ballistics, hydrodynamics and high-velocity electronic calculations. During World War II he joined the warfare experiments at Los Alamos, where he participated in the top secret project of developing the atom bomb. During the 1940s he took a leading part in developing computers. From 1944 he also took an intensive part in formulating the EDVAC-type machine. In his last years he became interested in the general theory of automatics.

Three out of his five studies have been published only posthumously.