John Von Neumann - Early Life and Education

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had published two major mathematical papers, the second of which gave the modern definition of ordinal numbers, which superseded Georg Cantor's definition.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.