voluntary euthanasia See EUTHANASIA. von Neumann, John (1903–57), Hungarian-born American mathematician, physicist, logician, economist, engineer, and computer scientist. Born in Budapest and trained in Hungary, Switzerland, and Germany, he visited Princeton University in 1930 and became a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1933. His most outstanding work in pure mathematics was on rings of operators in Hilbert spaces. In quantum mechanics he showed the equivalence of matrix mechanics to wave mechanics, and argued that quantum mechanics could not be embedded in an underlying deterministic system. He established important results in set theory and mathematical logic, and worked on Hilbert’s Program to prove the consistency of mathematics within mathematics until he was shocked by Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. He established the mathematical theory of games and later showed its application to economics.
In these many different areas, von Neumann demonstrated a remarkable ability to analyze a subject matter and develop a mathematical formalism that answered basic questions about that subject matter; formalization in logic is the special case of this process where the subject matter is language and reasoning. With the advent of World War II von Neumann turned his great analytical ability to more applied areas of hydrodynamics, ballistics, and nuclear explosives. In 1945 he began to work on the design, use, and theory of electronic computers. He later became a leading scientist in government.
Von Neumann contributed to the hardware architecture of the modern electronic computer, and he invented the first modern program language. A program in this language could change the addresses of its own instructions, so that it became possible to use the same subroutine on different data structures and to write programs to process programs. Von Neumann proposed to use a computer as a research tool for exploring very complex phenomena, such as the discontinuous nature of shock waves. He began the development of a theory of automata that would cover computing, communication, and control systems, as well as natural organisms, biological evolution, and societies. To this end, he initiated the study of probabilistic automata and of selfreproducing and cellular automata.
See also COGNITIVE SCIENCE , COMPUTER THEORY , CYBERNETICS , PHILOSOPHY OF MIND , SELF -REPRODUCING AUTOMATO. A.W.B.