Neumann Janos Lajos December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian-American . He was regarded as having perhaps the widest coverage of any mathematician of his time and was said to have been "the last representative of the great mathematicians who were equally at home in both pure and applied mathematics". He integrated pure and
Life and education
Family background:-
Von Neumann was born in Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary (which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire),[25][26][27] on December 28, 1903, to a wealthy, acculturated, and non-observant Jewish family. His Hungarian birth name was Neumann Janos Lajos. In Hungarian, the family name comes first, and his given names are equivalent to John Louis in English.
He was the eldest of three brothers; his two younger siblings were Mihály (English: Michael von Neumann; 1907–1989) and Miklós (Nicholas von Neumann, 1911–2011). His father, Neumann Miksa (Max von Neumann, 1873–1928) was a banker, who held a doctorate in law. He had moved to Budapest from Pécs at the end of the 1880s. Mikasa's father and grandfather were both born in Ond (now part of the town of Szerencs), , northern Hungary. John's mother was Kann Margit (English: Margaret Kann); her parents were Jakab Kann and Katalin Meisels of the Meisels family.Three generations of the Kann family lived in spacious apartments above the Kann-Heller offices in Budapest; von Neumann's family occupied an 18-room apartment on the top floor.[33]
On February 20, 1913, Emperor Franz Joseph elevated John's father to the Hungarian nobility for his service to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.[12] The Neumann family thus acquired the hereditary appellation Marquitta, meaning "of Magritte" (today Marghita , Romania). The family had no connection with the town; the appellation was chosen in reference to Margaret, as was their chosen coat of arms depicting three marguerites. Neumann Janos became Magrittian Neumann Junos (John Neumann de Magritte), which he later changed to the German Johann von Neumann.
University studies:-
According to his friend Theodore von Kármán, von Neumann's father wanted John to follow him into industry and thereby invest his time in a more financially useful endeavor than mathematics. In fact, his father asked von Kármán to persuade his son not to take mathematics as his major.[50] Von Neumann and his father decided that the best career path was to become a chemical engineer. This was not something that von Neumann had much knowledge of, so it was arranged for him to take a two-year, non-degree course in chemistry at the University of Berlin, after which he sat for the entrance exam to the prestigious ETH Zurich,[51] which he passed in September 1923.At the same time, von Neumann also entered Pázmány Péter University in Budapest,[53] as a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics. For his thesis, he chose to produce an axiomatization of Cantor's set theory.[54][55] He graduated as a chemical engineer from ETH Zurich in 1926 (although Wigner says that von Neumann was never very attached to the subject of chemistry), and passed his final examinations with summa cum laude for his Ph.D. in mathematics (with minors in experimental physics and chemistry) simultaneously with his chemical engineering degree, of which Wigner wrote, "Evidently a Ph.D. thesis and examination did not constitute an appreciable effort."[] He then went to the University of Göttingen on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to study mathematics under David Hilbert.[58]Hermann Weyl, in his obituary of Emmy Noether, remembers how in the winter of 1926-1927 von Neumann, Noether and himself would take walks after his classes through "the cold, wet, rain-wet streets of Göttingen" where they discussed hypercomplex number systems and their representations.
Career and private life:-
Von Neumann held a lifelong passion for ancient history and was renowned for his historical knowledge. A professor of Byzantine history at Princeton once said that von Neumann had greater expertise in Byzantine history than he did.[79] He knew by heart much of the material in Gibbon'sDecline and Fall and after dinner liked to engage in various historical discussions. Ulm noted that one time while driving south to a meeting of the American Mathematical Society, von Neumann would describe even the minutest details of the battles of the Civil War that occurred in the places they drove by. This kind of travel where he could be in a car and talk for hours on topics ranging from mathematics to literature without interruption was something he enjoyed very much.
Von Neumann liked to eat and drink. His wife, Klara, said that he could count everything except calories. He enjoyed Yiddish and "off-color" humor (especially limericks). He was a non-smoker. In Princeton, he received complaints for regularly playing extremely loud German march music on his phonograph, which distracted those in neighboring offices, including Albert Einstein, from their work. Von Neumann did some of his best work in noisy, chaotic environments, and once admonished his wife for preparing a quiet study for him to work in. He never used it, preferring the couple's living room with his wife's phonograph playing loudly. Despite being a notoriously bad driver, he enjoyed driving—frequently while reading a book—occasioning numerous arrests as well as accidents. When Cuthbert Hurd hired him as a consultant to IBM, Hurd often quietly paid the fines for his traffic tickets
Von Neumann's closest friend in the United States was mathematician Stanislaw Ulam. A later friend of Ulam's, Gian-Carlo Rota, wrote, "They would spend hours on end gossiping and giggling, swapping Jewish jokes, and drifting in and out of mathematical talk." When von Neumann was dying in the hospital, every time Ulam visited, he came prepared with a new collection of jokes to cheer him up. Von Neumann believed that much of his mathematical thought occurred intuitively; he would often go to sleep with a problem unsolved and know the answer upon waking up. Ulan noted that von Neumann's way of thinking might not be visual, but more aural.
In February 1951 for the New York Times he had his brain waves scanned while at rest and while thinking (along with Albert Einstein and Norbert Wiener). "They generally showed differences from the average" was the conclusion.
Computer science:-
Von Neumann was a founding figure in computing. Von Neumann was the inventor, in 1945, of the merge sort algorithm, in which the first and second halves of an array are each sorted recursively and then merged. Von Neumann wrote the 23-page-long sorting program for the EDVAC in ink. On the first page, traces of the phrase "TOP SECRET", which was written in pencil and later erased, can still be seen. He also worked on the philosophy of artificial intelligence with Alan Turing when the latter visited Princeton in the 1930s.
Von Neumann's hydrogen bomb work was played out in the realm of computing, where he and Stanisław Ulam developed simulations on von Neumann's digital computers for the hydrodynamic computations. During this time he contributed to the development of the Monte Carlo method, which allowed solutions to complicated problems to be approximated using random numbers. Flow chart from von Neumann's "Planning and coding of problems for an electronic computing instrument", published in 1Von Neumann's algorithm for simulating a fair coin with Biases coin is used in the "software whitening" stage of some hardware random number generators.[298] Because using lists of "truly" random numbers was extremely slow, von Neumann developed a form of making pseudorandom numbers, using the middle-square method. Though this method has been criticized as crude, von Neumann was aware of this: he justified it as being faster than any other method at his disposal, writing that "Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin." Von Neumann also noted that when this method went awry it did so obviously, unlike other methods which could be subtly incorreWhile consulting for the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania on the EDVAC project, von Neumann wrote an incomplete First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC. The paper, whose premature distribution nullified the patent claims of EDVAC designers J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, described a computer architecture in which the data and the program are both stored in the computer's memory in the same address space. This architecture is the basis of most modern computer designs, unlike the earliest computers that were "programmed" using a separate memory device such as a paper tape or plugboard. Although the single-memory, stored program architecture is commonly called von Neumann architecture as a result of von Neumann's paper, the architecture was based on the work of Eckert and Mauchly, inventors of the ENIAC computer at the University of Pennsylvania.[300]Von Neumann consulted for the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory, most notably on the ENIAC project,[301] as a member of its Scientific Advisory Committee.[302] The electronics of the new ENIAC ran at one-sixth the speed, but this in no way degraded the ENIAC's performance, since it was still entirely I/O bound. Complicated programs could be developed and debugged in days rather than the weeks required for plug boarding the old ENIAC. Some
The next computer that von Neumann designed was the IAS machine at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He arranged its financing, and the components were designed and built at the RCA Research Laboratory nearby. Von Neumann recommended that the , nicknamed the defense computer, include a magnetic drum. It was a faster version of the IAS machine and formed the basis for the commercially successful
Herman Goldstine once described how he felt that even in comparison to all his technical achievements in computer science, it was the fact that he was held in such high esteem, had such a reputation, that the digital computer was accepted so quickly and worked on by others.[310] As an example, he talked about Tom Watson, Jr.'s meetings with von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study, whom he had come to see after having heard of von Neumann's work and wanting to know what was happening for himself personally. IBM, which Watson Jr. later became CEO and president of, would play an enormous role in the forthcoming computer industry. The second example was that once von Neumann was elected Commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission, he would exert great influence over the commission's laboratories to promote the use of computers and to spur competition between IBM and Sperry-Rand, which would result in the Stretch and LARC computers that lead to further developments in the field. Goldstine also notes how von Neumann's expository style when speaking about technical subjects, particularly to non-technical audiences, was very attractive.[311] This view was held not just by him but by many other mathematicians and scientists of the time too.[312]
In 1955 von Neumann suffered a fall. During the medical examination that followed his physician noticed a mass growing near his collarbone. A biopsy of this mass led to a diagnosis of metastatic cancer, originating either in von Neumann's skeleton, pancreas or prostate.[89][90] The original malignancy may have been caused by exposure to radiation during his time at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Von Neumann was unable to accept the proximity of his own demise, and the shadow of impending death instilled great fear in him He invited a Catholic priest, Father Anselm Stradlater, O.S.B., to visit him for consultation. Von Neumann reportedly said, "So long as there is the possibility of eternal damnation for nonbelievers it is more logical to be a believer at the end," referring to Pascal's wager. He had earlier confided to his mother, "There probably has to be a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn't." Father Stradlater administered the last rites to him. Some of von Neumann's friends, such as Abraham Pais and Oskar Morgenstern, said they had always believed him to be "completely agnostic".] Of this deathbed conversion, Morgenstern told Heim's , "He was of course completely agnostic all his life, and then he suddenly turned Catholic—it doesn't agree with anything whatsoever in his attitude, outlook and thinking when he was healthy." Father Stradlater recalled that even after his conversion, von Neumann did not receive much peace or comfort from it, as he still remained terrified of death.
During the last few weeks of von Neumann's life many friends and relatives visited him at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital in NWWashington, D.C. He entertained his brother Mike by reciting by heart and word-for-word the first few lines of each page of Goethe's Faust. His brother would read Faust to him and when he paused to turn the page, Von Neumann would recite from memory the first few lines of the following page. Likewise, his brother-in-law Stan Ulm read to von Neumann in Greek from a worn copy of Thucydides'History. Ulm remembers von Neumann correcting his occasional misreading's and mispronunciations from memory.
On his deathbed von Neumann's mental capabilities became a fraction of what they were before, causing him much anguish. Marina von Neumann later remembered that in the days before her father's death,
[he] clearly realized that the illness had gone to his brain and that he could no longer think, and he asked me to test him on really simple arithmetic problems, like seven plus four, and I did this for a few minutes, and then I couldn’t take it anymore; I left the room.
Von Neumann published over 150 papers: about 60 in pure mathematics, 60 in applied mathematics, 20 in physics, and the remainder on special mathematical subjects or non-mathematical subjects.[16] His last work, an unfinished manuscript written while he was dying, was later published in book form as The Computer and the Brain.
His analysis of the structure of self-replication preceded the discovery of the structure of DNA. In a shortlist of facts about his life he submitted to the National Academy of Sciences, he wrote, "The part of my work I consider most essential is that on quantum mechanics, which developed in Göttingen in 1926, and subsequently in Berlin in 1927–1929. Also, my work on various forms of operator theory, Berlin 1930 and Princeton 1935–1939; on the ergodic theorem, Princeton, 1931–1932."
At the peak of his influence in the 1950s, he was the chair for a number of critical Defense Department committees including the Strategic Missile Evaluation Committee and the ICBM Scientific Advisory Committee. He was also a member of the influential Atomic Energy Commission in charge of all atomic energy development in the country. He played a key role alongside Bernard Schriever and Trevor Gardner in contributing to the design and development of the United States' first ICBM programs. During this time, he was considered the nation's foremost expert on nuclear weaponry and the leading defense scientist at the Pentagon. As a Hungarian émigré, concerned that the Soviets would achieve nuclear superiority, he designed and promoted the policy of mutually assured destruction to limit the arms race.
In honor of his achievements and contributions to the modern world, he was named in 1999 the Financial TimesPerson of the Century, as a representative of the century's characteristic ideal that the power of the mind could shape the physical world, and of the "intellectual brilliance and human savagery" that defined the 20th century.
Life and education
Family background:-
Von Neumann was born in Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary (which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire),[25][26][27] on December 28, 1903, to a wealthy, acculturated, and non-observant Jewish family. His Hungarian birth name was Neumann Janos Lajos. In Hungarian, the family name comes first, and his given names are equivalent to John Louis in English.
He was the eldest of three brothers; his two younger siblings were Mihaly (English: Michael von Neumann; 1907–1989) and Miklos (Nicholas von Neumann, 1911–2011). His father, Neumann Miksa (Max von Neumann, 1873–1928) was a banker, who held a doctorate in law. He had moved to Budapest from Paces at the end of the 1880s. Mika's father and grandfather were both born in Ond (now part of the town of Szerencs), Zemplén County, northern Hungary. John's mother was Kann Margit (English: Margaret Kann); her parents were Jakab Kann and Katalin Meisels of the Meisels family. Three generations of the Kann family lived in spacious apartments above the Kann-Heller offices in Budapest; von Neumann's family occupied an 18-room apartment on the top floor.
On February 20, 1913, Emperor Franz Joseph elevated John's father to the Hungarian nobility for his service to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Neumann family thus acquired the hereditary appellation Magrittian, meaning "of Magritte" (today Marghita, Romania). The family had no connection with the town; the appellation was chosen in reference to Margaret, as was their chosen coat of arms depicting three marguerites. Neumann Janos became Magrittian Neumann Junos (John Neumann de Magritte), which he later changed to the German Johann von Neumann.
Child prodigy:-
Von Neumann was a child prodigy. When he was six years old, he could divide two eight-digit numbers in his head[35][36] and could converse in Ancient Greek. When the six-year-old von Neumann caught his mother staring aimlessly, he asked her, "What are you calculating?"[37]
When they were young, von Neumann, his brothers and his cousins were instructed by governesses. Von Neumann's father believed that knowledge of languages other than their native Hungarian was essential, so the children were tutored in English, French, German and Italian.[38] By the age of eight, von Neumann was familiar with differential and integral calculus, and by twelve he had read and understood Borel's Théorie des Fonctions.[39] But he was also particularly interested in history. He read his way through Wilhelm Oncken's 46-volume world history series Allgemeine Geschichte in Einzeldarstellungen (General History in Monographs).[40] A copy was contained in a private library Max purchased. One of the rooms in the apartment was converted into a library and reading room, with bookshelves from ceiling to floor.[41]
Von Neumann entered the Lutheran Fasori Evangélikus Gimnázium in 1914.[42]Eugene Wigner was a year ahead of von Neumann at the Lutheran School and soon became his friend.[43] This was one of the best schools in Budapest and was part of a brilliant education system designed for the elite. Under the Hungarian system, children received all their education at the one gymnasium. The Hungarian school system produced a generation noted for intellectual achievement, many of which were Jews or of Jewish descent, which included Theodore von Kármán (born 1881), George de Hevesy (born 1885), Michael Polanyi (born 1891), Leó Szilárd (born 1898), Dennis Gabor (born 1900), Eugene Wigner (born 1902), Edward Teller (born 1908), and Paul Erdős (born 1913).[44] Collectively, they were sometimes known as "The Martians".[45]
Although von Neumann's father insisted von Neumann attend school at the grade level appropriate to his age, he agreed to hire private tutors to give von Neumann advanced instruction in those areas in which he had displayed an aptitude. At the age of 15, he began to study advanced calculus under the renowned analyst Gábor Szegő.[43] On their first meeting, Szegő was so astounded with the boy's mathematical talent that he was brought to tears.[46] Some of von Neumann's instant solutions to the problems that Szeto posed in calculus are sketched out on his father's stationery and are still on display at the von Neumann archive in Budapest.[43] As for his other subjects, he received a grade of A for all barring B's in geometrical drawing, writing and music, and a C for physical education.[47] By the age of 19, von Neumann had published two major mathematical papers, the second of which gave the modern definition of ordinal numbers, which superseded Georg Cantor's definition.[48] At the conclusion of his education at the gymnasium, von Neumann sat for and won the Eötvös Prize, a national prize for mathematics.
Undercity studies:-
According to his friend Theodore von Kármán, von Neumann's father wanted John to follow him into industry and thereby invest his time in a more financially useful endeavor than mathematics. In fact, his father asked von Kármán to persuade his son not to take mathematics as his major. Von Neumann and his father decided that the best career path was to become a chemical engineer. This was not something that von Neumann had much knowledge of, so it was arranged for him to take a two-year, non-degree course in chemistry at the University of Berlin, after which he sat for the entrance exam to the prestigious ETH Zurich,[51] which he passed in September 1923. At the same time, von Neumann also entered Pázmány Péter University in Budapest, as a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics. For his thesis, he chose to produce an axiomatization of Cantor's set theory. He graduated as a chemical engineer from ETH Zurich in 1926 (although Wigner says that von Neumann was never very attached to the subject of chemistry), and passed his final examinations with summa cum laude for his Ph.D. in mathematics (with minors in experimental physics and chemistry) simultaneously with his chemical engineering degree, of which Wigner wrote, "Evidently a Ph.D. thesis and examination did not constitute an appreciable effort .He then went to the University of Göttingen on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to study mathematics under David HilbertHermann Weyl, in his obituary of Emmy Noether, remembers how in the winter of 1926-1927 von Neumann, Nether and himself would take walks after his classes through "the cold, wet, rain-wet streets of Göttingen" where they discussed hypercomplex number systems and their representations.
Career and life:-
Excerpt from the university calendars for 1928 and 1928/29 of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin announcing Neumann's lectures on the theory of functions II, axiomatic set theory and mathematical logic, the mathematical colloquium, review of recent work in quantum mechanics, special functions of mathematical physics and Hilbert's proof theory. He also lectured on the theory of relativity, set theory, integral equations and analysis of infinitely many variables.Von Neumann's habilitation was completed on December 13, 1927, and he began to give lectures as a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin in 1928. He was the youngest person ever elected Privatdozent in the university's history in any subject. By the end of 1927, von Neumann had published 12 major papers in mathematics, and by the end of 1929, 32, a rate of nearly one major paper per month. In 1929, he briefly became a Privatdozent at the University of Hamburg, where the prospects of becoming a tenured professor were better, but in October of that year a better offer presented itself when he was invited to Princeton University as a visiting lecturer in mathematical physicsOn New Year's Day 1930, von Neumann married Marietta Kaveri, who had studied economics at Budapest University. Von Neumann and Marietta had one child, a daughter, Marina, born in 1935. As of 2021 Marina is a distinguished professor emerita of business administration and public policy at the University of Michigan.[65] The couple divorced on November 2, 1937.On November 17, 1938, von Neumann married Klara Dan, whom he had met during his last trips back to Budapest before the outbreak of World War II. Before marrying Marietta, von Neumann was baptized a Catholic in 1930.Von Neumann's father, Max, had died in 1929. None of the family had converted to Christianity while Max was alive, but all did afterward.
In 1933 Von Neumann was offered and accepted a life tenure professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey, when that institution's plan to appoint Hermann Weyl appeared to have failed His mother, brothers and in-laws followed von Neumann to the United States in 1939. Von Neumann anglicized his first name to John, keeping the German-aristocratic surname von Neumann. His brothers changed theirs to "Neumann" and "Veneman". Von Neumann became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1937, and immediately tried to become a lieutenant in the United States Army's Officers Reserve Corps. He passed the exams easily but was rejected because of his age. His prewar analysis of how France would stand up to Germany is often quoted: "Oh, France won't matter."
Klara and John von Neumann were socially active within the local academic community.His white clapboard house at 26 Westcott Road was one of Princeton's largest private residences. He always wore formal suits. He once wore a three-piece pinstripe while riding down the Grand Canyon astride a mule. Hilbert is reported to have asked, "Pray, who is the candidate's tailor?" at von Neumann's 1926 doctoral exam, as he had never seen such beautiful evening clothes.
Von Neumann held a lifelong passion for ancient history and was renowned for his historical knowledge. A professor of Byzantine history at Princeton once said that von Neumann had greater expertise in Byzantine history than he did. He knew by heart much of the material in Gibbon'sDecline and Fall and after dinner liked to engage in various historical discussions. Ulam noted that one time while driving south to a meeting of the American Mathematical Society, von Neumann would describe even the minutest details of the battles of the Civil War that occurred in the places they drove by. This kind of travel where he could be in a car and talk for hours on topics ranging from mathematics to literature without interruption was something he enjoyed very much.
Von Neumann liked to eat and drink. His wife, Klara, said that he could count everything except calories. He enjoyed Yiddish and "off-color" humor (especially limericks).[39] He was a non-smoker.[82] In Princeton, he received complaints for regularly playing extremely loud German march music on his phonograph, which distracted those in neighboring offices, including Albert Einstein, from their work.[83] Von Neumann did some of his best work in noisy, chaotic environments, and once admonished his wife for preparing a quiet study for him to work in. He never used it, preferring the couple's living room with his wife's phonograph playing loudly. Despite being a notoriously bad driver, he enjoyed driving—frequently while reading a book—occasioning numerous arrests as well as accidents. When Cuthbert Hurd hired him as a consultant to IBM, Hurd often quietly paid the fines for his traffic tickets.
Von Neumann's closest friend in the United States was mathematician Stanislaw Ulam. A later friend of Ulm's, Gian-Carlo Rota, wrote, "They would spend hours on end gossiping and giggling, swapping Jewish jokes, and drifting in and out of mathematical talk." When von Neumann was dying in the hospital, every time Ulam visited, he came prepared with a new collection of jokes to cheer him up. Von Neumann believed that much of his mathematical thought occurred intuitively; he would often go to sleep with a problem unsolved and know the answer upon waking up.Ulam noted that von Neumann's way of thinking might not be visual, but more aural.
In February 1951 for the New York Times he had his brain waves scanned while at rest and while thinking (along with Albert Einstein and Norbert Wiener). "They generally showed differences from the average" was the conclusion.
Illness and death:-
In 1955 von Neumann suffered a fall. During the medical examination that follower his physician noticed a mass growing near his collarbone. A biopsy of this mass led to a diagnosis of metastatic cancer, originating either in von Neumann's skeleton, pancreas or prostate. The original malignancy may have been caused by exposure to radiation during his time at Los Alamos National .
Von Neumann was unable to accept the proximity of his own demise, and the shadow of impending death instilled great fear in him. He invited a Catholic priest, Father Anselm Stradlater, O.S.B., to visit him for consultation. Von Neumann reportedly said, "So long as there is the possibility of eternal damnation for nonbelievers it is more logical to be a believer at the end," referring to Pascal's wager. He had earlier confided to his mother, "There probably has to be a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn't." Father Stradlater administered the last rites to him. Some of von Neumann's friends, such as Abraham Pais and Oskar Morgenstern, said they had always believed him to be "completely agnostic". Of this deathbed conversion, Morgenstern told Heims , "He was of course completely agnostic all his life, and then he suddenly turned Catholic—it doesn't agree with anything whatsoever in his attitude, outlook and thinking when he was healthy." Father Strittmatter recalled that even after his conversion, von Neumann did not receive much peace or comfort from it, as he still remained terrified of death.
During the last few weeks of von Neumann's life many friends and relatives visited him at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital in NWWashington, D.C. He entertained his brother Mike by reciting by heart and word-for-word the first few lines of each page of Goethe's Faust. His brother would read Faust to him and when he paused to turn the page, Von Neumann would recite from memory the first few lines of the following page.[27] Likewise, his brother-in-law Stan Ulam read to von Neumann in Greek from a worn copy of Thucydides'History. Ulam remembers von Neumann correcting his occasional misreadings and mispronunciations from memory.[101]
On his deathbed von Neumann's mental capabilities became a fraction of what they were before, causing him much anguish. Marina von Neumann later remembered that in the days before her father's death,
[he] clearly realized that the illness had gone to his brain and that he could no longer think, and he asked me to test him on really simple arithmetic problems, like seven plus four, and I did this for a few minutes, and then I couldn’t take it anymore; I left the room.[101]
At times von Neumann even even forgot the lines that his brother recited from Faust. Meanwhile, Clay Blair remarked that von Neumann did not give up research until his death: "It was characteristic of the impatient, witty and incalculably brilliant John von Neumann that although he went on working for others until he could do no more, his own treatise on the workings of the brain—the work he thought would be his crowning achievement in his own name—was left unfinished."
John von Neumann died on February 8, 1957 at Walter Reed. Two guards were posted outside his hospital room's door lest he reveal any military secrets while undergoing palliative medication. He was buried at Princeton Cemetery of Nassau Presbyterian Church in Princeton, Mercer County, New Jersey.
Ulam, in his autobiography (originally intended to be a book on von Neumann) wrote that von Neumann had died prematurely, "seeing the promised land but hardly entering it". Von Neumann's published work on automata and the brain contained only the barest sketches of what he planned to think about, and although he had a great fascination with them, many of the significant discoveries and advancements in molecular biology and computing were made only after he died before he could make any further contributions to them. On his deathbed he was still unsure of whether he had done enough important work in his life. Although he never lived to see the University of California, Los Angeles campus built, he had accepted an appointment as professor-at-large there.
Career and private life:-
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