John von Neumann

Hungarian-born American mathematician, from 1933 a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, whose work spans quantum mechanics, game theory and computing. He proved the minimaxminimax, n.: A way for a game-playing program to choose moves by assuming the opponent will always make their best reply, and picking the move whose worst-case outcome is best. theorem for two-player zero-sum games (1928) and, with Oskar Morgenstern, wrote 'Theory of Games and Economic Behavior' (1944). His 'First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC' (1945) described the stored-program design now called the von Neumann architecture, and at Los Alamos he developed the Monte Carlo methodMonte Carlo method, n.: Estimating an answer by running many random trials and averaging the results — like estimating the odds in a card game by dealing thousands of hands instead of calculating. with Stanislaw Ulam. Later work on self-reproducing cellular automata anticipated artificial lifeartificial life, n.: The study of life by building lifelike systems — in computer simulations, robots or chemistry — to learn how living things organize themselves, reproduce and evolve, and what other kinds of life could exist., and his unfinished lectures 'The Computer and the Brain' (published 1958) compared digital and neural computation. Ulam recalled a conversation in which von Neumann spoke of accelerating technological progress approaching an essential 'singularity' in human history, the earliest known use of the idea behind the technological singularitytechnological singularity, n.: A moment some people expect in the future when technology, usually AI smarter than us, starts changing the world so fast and so deeply that we cannot see past it..