American mathematician, physicist, and economist John von Neumann was born in Budapest, Hungary. He showed an early precocity in mathematics and was privately tutored in the subject; his first paper was written before he was eighteen. He studied at the universities of Berlin, Zürich, and Budapest and received his doctorate in mathematics from Budapest in 1926, almost simultaneously with an undergraduate degree in chemistry from Zürich. After serving as Privatdozent at Berlin, he accepted a visiting professorship at Princeton in 1930. Following three years there, he became a professor of mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, a position that he held for the rest of his life. In 1955 he was appointed one of the commissioners of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, on which he served brilliantly until his death.

Von Neumann made fundamental contributions to mathematics, physics, and economics. Furthermore...