a Genius,
JOHN VON NEUMANN, Innovator and a Great Legend.
About………. Born on 28th December 1903 Place of Birth : Hungary By the age of six, he could exchange jokes in Classical Greek, memorize telephone directories, and displayed mental calculation abilities He was primarily a mathematician, but along with it he also proved himself in many fields such as Physics, COMPUTING, liquid dynamics and many more.
About….. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Pázmány Peter University in Budapest at of age of 22. He earned his diploma in chemical engineering from the ETH Zurich in Switzerland in 1926. He married Mariette Kövesi in 1930, just before moving to the United States. They had one daughter. He then divorced her in 1937 and married Klara Dan in 1938.
IAS machine From 1945-1951 at Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, New Jersey 40 bit word machine which stores 20 bits per word. Memory is 1024 words. Two general purpose register : Accumulator and multiplier First machine to have data and instruction in same memory.
IAS machine Was asynchronous machine. Addition time was 62 microseconds and multiplication time was 713 microseconds. The architecture of the IAS machine was actually sent to so many establishments who were interested in computing. But the derivatives were not software compatible in the modern sense.
Manhattan project (1945) The main role of john von Neumann was to work on A-bomb and H-Bomb. He worked on the complex mathematical calculations done by the computers which were used to design the bombs. He was also member of the target committee which was formed to decide which places of japan should be bombed. Is considered as an important person in the design of little boy and fat man. Von Neumann’s principal contribution to the atomic bomb itself was in the concept and design of the explosive lenses needed to compress the plutonium core of the device.
Monte- carlo method ďƒ˛ In 1946, Von Neumann started working on this problem when he was working for the hydrogen bomb project or the H-bomb project. ďƒ˛ The method varies but has a common pattern 1. Define a domain of possible inputs. 2. Generate inputs randomly from a probability distribution over the domain 3. Perform a deterministic computations of the inputs 4. Aggregate the results.
ďƒ˛.Though criticized by many, Von Neumann had his explanations and correct reasons to use it.
Contribution to ENIAC(1946) He was not there initially in the ENIAC project but was later consulted. Though ENIAC was initially designed to calculate the firing tables for the missiles, it was first used in the computations for development of hydrogen bomb. Some modifications were made after consulting John von Neumann. The electronics of the new ENIAC was one sixth the speed of earlier version, However this did not degrade the performance since it was completely I/O bound. The reason was for faster compilation. (days instead of weeks) He and his team were the first people to perform numerical weather forecast on ENIAC.
The EDVAC report In 1945 while he was consulting the Moore school of electrical engineering at the university of Pennsylvania. Described the system as very high-speed automatic digital computing system. Six major subdivisions: A central arithmetic part (CA), a central control part (CC), Memory (M), input (I), output (O), and external memory (R), such as punched cards, Teletype tape, or magnetic wire or steel tape.
The EDVAC report The CA will perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and square root. Other mathematical operations, such as logarithms and trigonometric functions are to be done with table look up and interpolation, possibly biquadratic. He notes that multiplication and division could be done with logarithm tables, but to keep the tables small enough, interpolation would be needed and this in turn requires multiplication, though perhaps with less precision. Involved controversies because of two reasons.
Other Contributions He recommended to use magnetic drum instead of William's tube in IBM 701 nicknamed “defense calculator”. This and the IAS machine together was the inspiration for the IBM 704. Stochastic computing was actually introduced by him. (collection of techniques that represent continuous values by streams of random bits. Complex computations can then be computed by simple bit-wise operations on the streams) He also invented the field of cellular automata. He could do large scale mining taking the advantage of exponential growth in self replicating system.
Other Contributions It actually led to discovery of DNA. He is also considered as theoritical father of Virology by some people as they think it was from his self replicating program the virus was originated (though the term was not used). In 1945 Donald knuth said that John Von Neumann was the inventor of the merge sort.
Last days… He passed away on February 8th 1957 His last work was titled “Computers and Brains” which showed his area of interest during his last days. Actually John von Neumann could not finish the book as he was already very sick and had eventually passed away. It was his widow klara Neumann who finished some of the details. related the computer with human brain, which draws many conclusions from comparison with respect to the role of code and language, which were never made before.
Awards and recognition Received Bôcher memorial award which is given for research in mathematical analysis. Received Enrico Fermi award( energy science and technology). They have a John Von Neumann theory prize which is a $5000, medal and a citation. (operational science/decision science)
References… http://history-computer.com/ModernComputer/thinkers/Neumann.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replication http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_701 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_constructor http://www.leydesdorff.net/vonneumann/ http://www.leydesdorff.net/vonneumann/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the_EDVAC http://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/john-von-neumann “It Begin with Babbage”: The genesis of Computer Science by Dr.Subrata Dasgupta.