page_title: John von Neumann
section_title: Early career and private life
hierarchical_section_title: John von Neumann / Early career and private life
caption_attribution_description: English: Scan of lectures of von Neumann in course catalogues Berlin 1928/29 (Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität) Deutsch: Von Neumann in den Vorlesungsverzeichnissen der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin. Die ersten drei Ausschnitte stammen aus dem Sommersemester 1928, der vierte Ausschnitt aus dem Wintersemester 1928/29.
context_page_description: John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. Von Neumann was generally regarded as the foremost mathematician of his time and said to be "the last representative of the great mathematicians"; he integrated pure and applied sciences.
  Von Neumann made major contributions to many fields, including mathematics, physics, economics, 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.
  Von Neumann published over 150 papers in his life: about 60 in pure mathematics, 60 in applied mathematics, 20 in physics, and the remainder on special mathematical subjects or non-mathematical ones. His last work, an unfinished manuscript written while he was in the hospital, was later published in book form as The Computer and the Brain.
  His analysis of the structure of self-replication preceded the discovery of the structure of DNA.
context_section_description: Von Neumann's habilitation was completed on December 13, 1927, and he started his lectures as a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin in 1928. He was the youngest person ever elected Privatdozent in the university's history in any subject. By the end of 1927, von Neumann had published 12 major papers in mathematics, and by the end of 1929, 32, a rate of nearly one major paper per month. His powers of recall allowed him to quickly memorize the pages of telephone directories, and recite the names, addresses and numbers therein. In 1929, he briefly became a Privatdozent at the University of Hamburg, where the prospects of becoming a tenured professor were better, but in October of that year a better offer presented itself when he was invited to Princeton University.
  On New Year's Day in 1930, von Neumann married Marietta Kövesi, who had studied economics at Budapest University. Von Neumann and Marietta had one child, a daughter, Marina, born in 1935. As of 2017, she is a distinguished professor of business administration and public policy at the University of Michigan. The couple divorced in 1937. In October 1938, von Neumann married Klara Dan, whom he had met during his last trips back to Budapest before the outbreak of World War II.
  Before marrying Marietta, von Neumann was baptized a Catholic in 1930. 
  Von Neumann's father, Max, had died in 1929. None of the family had converted to Christianity while Max was alive, but all did afterward.
  In 1933, he was offered a lifetime professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey when that institution's plan to appoint Hermann Weyl fell through. He remained a mathematics professor there until his death, although he had announced his intention to resign and become a professor at large at the University of California, Los Angeles. His mother, brothers and in-laws followed von Neumann to the United States in 1939. Von Neumann anglicized his first name to John, keeping the German-aristocratic surname von Neumann. His brothers changed theirs to "Neumann" and "Vonneumann". Von Neumann became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1937, and immediately tried to become a lieutenant in the United States Army's Officers Reserve Corps. He passed the exams easily but was rejected because of his age. His prewar analysis of how France would stand up to Germany is often quoted: "Oh, France won't matter."
  Klara and John von Neumann were socially active within the local academic community. His white clapboard house at 26 Westcott Road was one of Princeton's largest private residences. He always wore formal suits. He once wore a three-piece pinstripe while riding down the Grand Canyon astride a mule. Hilbert is reported to have asked, "Pray, who is the candidate's tailor?" at von Neumann's 1926 doctoral exam, as he had never seen such beautiful evening clothes.
  Von Neumann held a lifelong passion for ancient history and was renowned for his historical knowledge. A professor of Byzantine history at Princeton once said that von Neumann had greater expertise in Byzantine history than he did.
  Von Neumann liked to eat and drink; his wife, Klara, said that he could count everything except calories. He enjoyed Yiddish and "off-color" humor (especially limericks). He was a non-smoker. In Princeton, he received complaints for regularly playing extremely loud German march music on his phonograph, which distracted those in neighboring offices, including Albert Einstein, from their work. Von Neumann did some of his best work in noisy, chaotic environments, and once admonished his wife for preparing a quiet study for him to work in. He never used it, preferring the couple's living room with its television playing loudly. Despite being a notoriously bad driver, he enjoyed driving—frequently while reading a book—occasioning numerous arrests as well as accidents. When Cuthbert Hurd hired him as a consultant to IBM, Hurd often quietly paid the fines for his traffic tickets.
  Von Neumann's closest friend in the United States was mathematician Stanislaw Ulam. A later friend of Ulam's, Gian-Car
caption: Excerpt from the university calendars for 1928 and 1928/29 of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin announcing Neumann's lectures on axiomatic set theory and mathematical logic, new work in quantum mechanics and special functions of mathematical physics.
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