Carlo Denza : 14 November 2025 22:42
We meet the man considered one of the most multifaceted and brilliant scientists of the last century, perhaps equal only to Einstein. He possessed a wide range of scientific talents, developed in part thanks to a stimulating environment; indeed, in those years, Hungary offered a very flourishing mathematical landscape.
These abilities were discovered by his math teacher, László Rátz, a renowned professor at a Lutheran school in Budapest. Neumann’s knowledge spanned mathematics, physics, chemistry, and algebra, to name a few. His innovative ideas and kaleidoscopic mind generated and brought to life new solutions that still form the basis of the technological tools we use today.
Janos Lanos Neumann, John in English, a Hungarian Jew, was born in flourishing Budapest during the glittering Belle Époque period, on 28 December 1903. His father Miksa (Maximilian) Neumann and his mother Margit (Margaret) Kann, cultured and wealthy, were part of the Jewish community of the Hungarian capital.
Maximilian Neumann was a doctor of law and director of an investment bank. Janos’s mother, Margit, came from a wealthy Budapest family. The two had three sons (John, Michael, and Nicholas). The eldest, Janos, inherited the title “von” from his father, awarded to him in 1913 by Emperor Franz Joseph for his financial merits. For this reason, he was better known as John von Neumann.
A child prodigy with a keen intellect, at the age of six he could mentally multiply two multi-digit numbers. Some sources suggest that by the age of eight he already knew calculus and Greek, Latin, and, in addition to his native Hungarian, he also learned Italian and English.
He read entire encyclopedias, and legend has it that he always carried two books with him, fearing he’d run out of reading material. But Janos’s greatest talent lay neither in languages nor in reading encyclopedias, but in the language of science: mathematics.
Given the historical events of the time, Maximilian Neumann preferred to entrust the education of his children to educators or tutors, not enrolling them in Hungarian schools until the end of their childhood, pushing them to learn foreign languages.
John was the only one of three brothers to inherit from his grandfather, Jacob Kann, a prodigious mind and an incredible memory that allowed him to amaze his first educators, giving him the ability to perform complex mathematical operations mentally. But despite his many talents, he never mastered the use of a musical instrument or the game of chess. He continued his higher education (1914), enrolling at the prestigious Fasori, a Lutheran classical high school.
Recognizing the young boy’s powerful intellectual abilities, the renowned mathematics teacher László Rátz, from the Lutheran Gymnasium, offered, in agreement with his father Maximilian, to give him extracurricular lessons at the University of Budapest. His high school education was so fruitful that even before completing it, he wrote an article in collaboration with the renowned mathematician Feteke, later published in the journal of the Union of German Mathematicians. He graduated with honors, even receiving a national prize.
In 1921 he enrolled in the Mathematics Course at the University of Budapest, alternating the scientific education of his academic career between Budapest and Berlin, which in those years was experiencing a real affirmation of mathematical disciplines.
He studied chemical engineering between 1923 and 1925 at the Zurich Polytechnic. Between Vienna, Budapest, and Berlin, he became interested in every aspect of scientific debate and met the most important mathematicians of the time. In 1929, at the age of 26, Oswald Veblen, a prominent American mathematician, offered him a position as a visiting professor at Princeton University. That same year, he married and converted to Catholicism. When the Institute for Advanced Studies was founded in 1933, he was appointed professor of mathematics.
The years of World War II pushed governments and militaries into the world of computers. Land artillery forced the military to perform constant calculations to determine the precise trajectories of projectiles.
Each ballistics table required 2/4000 trajectories, each requiring approximately 700 multiplications. The military came to the rescue with the Differential Analyzer, a computer of the time that took 20 hours to calculate each ballistics table. This was still too long. A faster numerical machine was needed, and so the development of ENIAC (Electronic Numeral Integrator and Computer) began in 1943.
Eniac would be the first computer made of electronic circuits, with no moving mechanical parts. It was built to perform a single task at a time. Solving a different problem would have meant shutting down the computer and manually modifying the internal wiring, consisting of thousands of switches and their associated wire connections.
In 1944, Eckert and Mauchly (the designers of ENIAC) proposed a new machine, the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer), designed to store a program in memory. Von Neumann joined the project and in 1945 formalized a Report on EDVAC: the first computer with an internal operating system that could run other programs.
The EDVAC project was completed in 1952 and handed over to the Army Ballistics Laboratory in Aberdeen, where it would be paired with ENIAC. Von Neumann demonstrated that a computer could have a very simple fixed architecture and be capable of performing any type of calculation, with suitable programmed control, without necessarily modifying the hardware each time.
Carlo Denza