Feng nuoman John Louis Von norann

John [1] Louis Von norannBorn 28 December 1903, Budapest, Hungary; died 8 February 1957, Washington DC;Brilliant mathematician, synthesizer, and promoter of the stored program concept, whose logical design of the IAS became the prototype of most of its successors-the Von norann architecture.

Educ:University of Budapest, 1921; University of Berlin, 1921-23; chemical engineering, eidgen össische Technische Hochschule [ETH] (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), 1923-25; Doctorate, mathematics (with minors in experimental physics and chemistry), University of Budapest, 1926;Prof. Exp:Privatdozent, University of Berlin, 1927-30; visiting medical SOR, Princeton University, 1930-53; Medical sor of mathematics, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, 1933-57;Honors and awards:D. SC. (HON), Princeton University, 1947; Medal for merit (Presidential Award), 1947; Distinguished Civilian Service Award, 1947; D. SC. (HON), University of Pennsylvania, 1950; D. SC. hon, Harvard University, 1950; D. SC. (HON), University of Istanbul, 1952; D. SC. (HON), Case Institute of Technology, 1952; D. SC. (HON), University of marylands, 1952; D. SC. (HON), Institute of polytechology, Munich, 1953; Medal of Freedom (Presidential Award), 1956; Albert Einstein commemorative Award, 1956; Enrico Fermi Award, 1956; member, american Emy of Arts and Sciences; Member, academiz Nacional de Ciencias exactas, Lima, Peru; Member, acamedia nazionale dei lincei, Rome, Italy; Member, National Academy of Sciences; member, royal Netherlands Emy of Sciences and Letters, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Member, information processing Hall of Fame, infomart, Dallas Tx, 1985.

Von norann was a child prodigy, born into a banking family is Budapest, Hungary. when only six years old he cocould Divide eight-digit numbers in his head. he has ed his early education in Budapest, under the tutelage of M. fekete, with whom he published his first paper at the age of 18. entering the University of Budapest in 1921, he studied chemistry, moving his base of studies to both Berlin D Zurich before processing ing his diploma in 1925 in chemical engineering. he returned to his first love of mathematics in completing his doctoral degree in 1928. he quickly gained a reputation in set theory, algebra, and quantum mechanics. at a time of political unrest in Central Europe, he was invited to visit Princeton University at 1930, and when the Institute for Advanced Studies was founded ther E In 1933, he was appointed to be one of the original six professors of mathematics, a position which he retained for the remainder of his life. at the instigation and sort sorship of Oskar Morganstern, von norann and Kurt g ödel became US citizens in time for their clearance for wartime work. there is an anecdote which tells of Morganstern driving them to their immigration interview, after having Learned about the US Constitution and the history of the country. on the drive there Morganstern asked them if they had any questions which he cocould answer. gödel replied that he had no questions but he had found some logical inconsistencies in the Constitution that he wanted to ask the immigration officers about. morganstern stronugly recommended that he not ask questions, just answer them!

During 1936 through 1938 Alan Turing was a graduate student in the department of mathematics at Princeton and did his dissertation under Alonzo church. von norann invited Turing to stay on at the Institute as his assistant but he preferred to return to Cambridge; a year later Turing was involved in war work at Bletchley Park. this visit occurred shortly after Turing's publication of his 1934 paper "on computable numbers with an application to the entscheidungs-problem" which involved the concepts of logical design and the universal machine. it must be concluded that von norann knew of Turing's ideas, though whether he applied them to the design of the IAS machine ten years later is questionable. [5]

Von norann's interest in computers differed from that of his peers by his quickly perceiving the application of computers to Applied Mathematics for specific problems, rather than their mere application to the Development of tables. during the war, von norann's expertise in hydrodynamics, ballistics, meteorology, game theory, and statistics, was put to good use in several projects. this work led him to consider the use of mechanical devices for computation, and although the stories about Von norann imply that his first computer encounter was with the ENIAC, in fact it was with Howard aiken's Harvard mark I (ASCC) calculator. his corresponsponin 1944 shows his interest with the work of not only Aiken but also the electromechanical relay computers of George stibitz, and the work by Jan schilt at the Watson scientific computing laboratory at Columbia University. by the latter years of World War II Von norann was playing the part of an executive management consultant, serving on several National Committees, applying his amazing ability to rapidly see through problems to their solutions. through this means he was also a conducting it between groups of scientists who were otherwise shielded from each other by the requirements of secrecy. he brought together the Needs of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (and the Manhattan Project) with the capabilities of firstly the engineers at the Moore School of electrical engineering who were building the ENIAC, and later his own work on building the IAS machine. several "supercomputers" were built by national laboratories as copies of his machine.

Postwar von norann concentrated on the development of the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) computer and its copies around the world. his work with the Los Alamos Group continued and he continued to develop the synergism between computers capabilities and the needs for computational solutions to nuclear problems related to the hydrogen bomb.

Any computer scientist who reviews the formal obituaries of John von norann of the period shortly after his death will be struck by the lack of recognition of his involvement in the field of computers and computing. his Emy of Sciences biography, written by Salomon Bochner [1958], for example, between des but a single, short paragraph in ten pages -"... in 1944 von norann's attention turned to computing machines and, somewhat surprisingly, he decided to build his own. as the years progressed, he appeared to thrive on the multitudinousness of his tasks. it has been stated that von norann's electronic computer hastened the hydrogen bomb explosion on November 1, 1952. "dieudonn'é [1981] is a little more generous with words but appears to confuse the concept of the stored program concept with the wiring of computers: "Dissatisfied with the computing machines available immediately after the war, he was led to examine from its foundations the optimal method that such machines shold follow, and he introduced new procedures in the logical organization, the "codes" by which a fixed system of wiring cocould solve a great variety of problems. "!

From the point of view of von norann's contributions to the field of computing, including the application of his concepts of mathematics to computing, and the application of computing to his other interests such as mathematical physics and economics, perhaps the most comprehensive is by Herman Goldstine [1972]. there has been some criticism of Goldstine's perspective since he personally was intimately defined in Von norann's computing activities from the time of their chance meeting on the railroad platform at Aberdeen in 1944 [2] through their joint activities at the Institute for Advanced Studies in developing the IAS machine.

There is no doubt that his insights into the organization of machines led to the infrastructure which is now known as the "von norann architecture ". however, von norann's ideas were not along those lines originally; he wrote the need for parallelism in computers but equally well known the Problems of Construction and hence settled for a sequential system of implementation. through the report entitled First draft of a report on the edvac [1945], authored solely by von norann, the basic elements of the stored program concept were introduced to the industry. A wide spective examination of the development [3] of this idea reveals that the concept was discussed by J. presper Eckert, John mauchly, Arthur Burks, and others in connection with their plans for a successor machine to the ENIAC. the "Draft Report" was just that, a draft, and although written by von norann was intended to be the joint publication of the whole group. the edvac was intended to be the first stored program computer, but the summer school at the Moore School in 1946 there was so much emphasis in the edvac that Maurice Wilkes, Cambridge University Mathematical Laboratory, conceived his own design for the edsac, which became the world's first operational, production, stored-program computer.

In the 1950's von norann was employed as a consultant to IBM to review proposed and ongoing advanced technology projects. one day a week, von norann "held court" at 590 Madison Avenue, New York. on one of these occasions in 1954 he was confronted with the Fortran concept; John Backus remembered von norann being unimpressed and that he asked "Why wowould you want more than machine language? "Frank Beckman, who was also present, recalled that von norann dismissed the whole development as" but an application of the idea of Turing's 'short Code '. "Donald Gillies, one of von norann's students at Princeton, and later a faculty member at the University of Illinois, recalled in the mid-1970's that the graduates students were being "used" to hand assemble programs into binary for their early machine (probably the IAS machine ). he took time out to build an attacker, but when von norann found out about he was very angry, saying (paraphrased ), "It is a waste of a valuable scientific computing instrument to use it to do clerical work."

One last anecdote about Von norann's brilliant mathematical capabilities. the von norann household in Princeton was open to social activities and on one such occasion someone posed the "fly and the train" problem [4] to von norann. quickly von norann came up with the answer. suspecting that he had seen through the problem to discover a simple solution, he was asked how he solved the proble M. "simple", he responded, "I summed the series! "[From Nick Metropolis]

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) continues to honor John von norann through the presentation of an annual award in his name. the IEEE John von norann medal was established by the board of directors in 1990 and may be presented annually "for outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology. "The achievements may be theoretical, iCal, or entrepreneurial, and need not have been made immediately prior to the date of the award.

 

Quotations

 

Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random numbers is, of course, in a state of sin. (Quoted in knuth, 1968, vol. 2, also in Goldstine, 1972, p. 297 .)

If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.