Early Life and Education
Von Neumann was born Neumann János Lajos (in Hungarian the family name comes first) in Budapest, Austro-Hungarian Empire, to wealthy Jewish parents. He was the eldest of three brothers. His father, Neumann Miksa (Max Neumann) was a banker, who held a doctorate in law. He had moved to Budapest from Pécs at the end of the 1880s. Miksa's father (Mihály b. 1839) and grandfather (Márton) were both born in Ond (present day town of Szerencs?), Zemplén county, northern Hungary. John's mother was Kann Margit (Margaret Kann). In 1913, his father was elevated to the nobility for his service to the Austro-Hungarian empire by Emperor Franz Josef. The Neumann family thus acquiring the hereditary title margittai, Neumann János became margittai Neumann János (John Neumann of Margitta), which he later changed to the German Johann von Neumann. János, nicknamed "Jancsi" (Johnny), was an extraordinary child prodigy in the areas of language, memorization, and mathematics. As a 6 year old, he could divide two 8-digit numbers in his head. By the age of 8, he was familiar with differential and integral calculus.
John entered the German-speaking Lutheran high school Fasori Evangelikus Gimnázium in Budapest in 1911. Although his father insisted he attend school at the grade level appropriate to his age, he agreed to hire private tutors to give him advanced instruction in those areas in which he had displayed an aptitude. At the age of 15, he began to study advanced calculus under the renowned analyst Gábor Szegő. On their first meeting, Szegő was so astounded with the boy's mathematical talent that he was brought to tears. Szegő subsequently visited the von Neumann house twice a week to tutor the child prodigy. Some of von Neumann's instant solutions to the problems in calculus posed by Szegő, sketched out with his father's stationery, are still on display at the von Neumann archive in Budapest. By the age of 19, von Neumann had published two major mathematical papers, the second of which gave the modern definition of ordinal numbers, which superseded Georg Cantor's definition.
He received his Ph.D. in mathematics (with minors in experimental physics and chemistry) from Pázmány Péter University in Budapest at the age of 22. He simultaneously earned a diploma in chemical engineering from the ETH Zurich in Switzerland at his father's request, who wanted his son to follow him into industry and therefore invest his time in a more financially useful endeavour than mathematics.
Read more about this topic: John Von Neumann
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Look at your [English] ladies of quality—are they not forever parting with their husbands—forfeiting their reputations—and is their life aught but dissipation? In common genteel life, indeed, you may now and then meet with very fine girls—who have politeness, sense and conversation—but these are few—and then look at your trademen’s daughters—what are they?—poor creatures indeed! all pertness, imitation and folly.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“It’s fairly obvious that American education is a cultural flop. Americans are not a well-educated people culturally, and their vocational education often has to be learned all over again after they leave school and college. On the other hand, they have open quick minds and if their education has little sharp positive value, it has not the stultifying effects of a more rigid training.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)