John von Neumann: The Mind That Built Computers and the Bomb

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John von Neumann's colleagues included Nobel laureates and the founders of quantum physics, and some of them half seriously suspected he was not human. Born in Budapest in 1903 to a wealthy banking family, he knew calculus by age eight and read a 46 volume world history for pleasure. His tutor, Gabor Szego, is said to have wept on seeing the boy's reasoning. At 19 he was publishing work on set theory, and he later earned a chemical engineering degree in Zurich and a mathematics PhD in Budapest at the same time.

This episode follows that mind to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he worked in a three-piece suit with German march music blaring. It covers the stored-program design that still underlies every phone and laptop, his self-replicating cellular automata, and his calculations for the implosion bomb at Los Alamos. It also faces the contradiction of a cheerful party host who became a fiercely anti-communist advocate of the hydrogen bomb, and who met his own death with fear.

• Early machines like ENIAC had to be rewired by hand for each new task. Von Neumann proposed keeping instructions and data in the same memory.
• He showed mathematically how a pattern on a grid could copy itself, years before biologists found the structure of DNA.
• At Los Alamos he treated compressed metal as a fluid to arrange the explosive lenses, and he calculated the altitude at which the bomb should detonate.
• When George Dantzig brought him an unsolved linear programming problem, he answered with an hour-long impromptu lecture introducing the theory of duality.
• Diagnosed with cancer in 1955, he ran ICBM committee meetings from his bed at Walter Reed and turned to Catholicism, reasoning along the lines of Pascal's wager.