John von Neumann – 1903-1957

Born in Hungary and educated there as well as in Germany and Switzerland, von Neumann immigrated to the United States in 1930 to teach at Princeton. He made fundamental contributions to mathematics (including the definition of ordinal numbers) and physics (his 1932 Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics remains standard), then created the field of game theory, with special application in economics. In computer science, von Neumann pioneered logical design.