Library SARC Research Person
John von Neumann
Mathematician; foundational to computing, game theory, and self-reproducing automata.
John von Neumann (1903–1957) published, by age 19, a new definition of the ordinal numbers that superseded Georg Cantor’s own, and his doctoral thesis produced an axiomatization of Cantor’s set theory, introducing the axiom of foundation and the notion of “class” to close off the paradoxes naive set theory had run into. He studied under David Hilbert at Göttingen in the 1920s, later engaging directly with Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, and went on to found the mathematical theory of self-reproducing automata, lay foundations for game theory, and shape the stored-program architecture underlying almost all subsequent computing.
Works in the Library
John von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam, John Conway CONCEPT
A grid of cells, each in one of a small set of states, updated all at once by a simple local rule — from which strikingly complex global behavior can emerge.
FORM MORPHOGENESIS DYNAMICS COMPUTATION