John von Neumann (December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian-American
mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. He was regarded as
having perhaps the widest coverage of any mathematician of his time and was said to have
been “the last representative of the great mathematicians who were equally at home in both
pure and applied mathematics”. He integrated pure and applied sciences. (資料來源 )
Von Neumann made major contributions to many fields, including mathematics (mathematical
logic, measure theory, functional analysis, ergodic theory, group theory, lattice theory,
representation theory, operator algebras, matrix theory, geometry, and numerical analysis),
physics (quantum mechanics, hydrodynamics & ballistics, nuclear physics and quantum
statistical mechanics), economics (game theory and general equilibrium theory), computing
(Von Neumann architecture, linear programming, numerical meteorology, scientific computing,
self-replicating machines, stochastic computing), and statistics.
He was a pioneer of the application of operator theory to quantum mechanics in the
development of functional analysis, and a key figure in the development of game theory and
the concepts of cellular automata, the universal constructor and the digital computer. (資料來源 )