John von Neumann (1903 to 1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician whose work touched an extraordinary range of fields, several of which feed directly into the history of artificial intelligence and computing. Trained in mathematics in Budapest and Zurich, he emigrated to the United States and became one of the founding professors of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
His most consequential contribution to computing was the 1945 “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,” which described in clean logical terms a computer with a single memory holding both program and data. That stored-program design - arithmetic, control, memory, and input-output organs working together - became known as the von Neumann architecture and underlies nearly every general-purpose computer built since. He went on to lead the Electronic Computer Project at the Institute for Advanced Study, building one of the influential early machines.
Von Neumann’s reach extended well beyond hardware. With Oskar Morgenstern he founded modern game theory, the mathematics of strategic decision-making that later shaped reinforcement learning and multi-agent AI. In his final years he studied self-reproducing automata, asking what logical structure a machine would need to build copies of itself - a question at the root of cellular automata and artificial life. He also worked on the Manhattan Project. His description of computer elements by explicit analogy to idealized neurons, borrowed from the McCulloch-Pitts model, marks an early crossing point between computing and the study of the brain.