John von Neumann

John von Neumann was born on 28 December 1903 in Budapest, then part of the Kingdom of Hungary, and died on 8 February 1957 at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital in Washington, D.C., of a cancer that may have originated from radiation exposure during his work at Los Alamos. He earned a doctorate in mathematics from Pazmany Peter University in Budapest, studied chemical engineering at ETH Zurich, and studied under David Hilbert at the University of Gottingen. During the Second World War he consulted for the ENIAC project at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering, whose designers John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert were already developing a design for a successor machine, the EDVAC, that would store its own instructions in memory rather than being rewired by hand for each new task. In June 1945 von Neumann wrote up this stored-program design in a document titled First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, which Herman Goldstine had typed and circulated to dozens of recipients; because von Neumann was the sole named author, the resulting design, a single memory holding both instructions and data, became known as the von Neumann architecture, and a lasting dispute over Mauchly and Eckert's uncredited design contributions followed. The report's early circulation also invalidated the patent protections the EDVAC team had been pursuing.