Research a person of interest from the 20th Century and explain their contributions to modern computing

John von Neumann

 

John von Neumann, born in Budapest, Hungary on December 28, 1903, was a major figure in computer science and a vital member of the Manhattan Project (Responsible for the first nuclear weapons during World War II).

In computer science, the use of memory in digital computers to store both sequences of instructions and data was a breakthrough to which von Neumann made major contributions. Today we are able to multitask and use our computers, tablets and smartphones for different tasks such as writing this blog post while listening to a song and this would not have been possible if it were not for von Neumann. He developed the idea of having a “stored-program computer,” which got us to evolve from punch-cards to eventually having stored programs, compilers, etc. With this idea, we do not need to make any hardware modifications and if properly programmed, we are able to use the same computer for different tasks.

This obviously made our lives much simpler and with the convenience of having a flexible and high-speed digital computers we have nowadays, this allows us to compute and program efficiently and also perform far more computational work in as little time as possible. This famous diagram below was designed by Neumann himself on a piece of tissue paper which we still use nowadays.

References

Lecture.eingang.org. (2016). History of Computing Science: John von Neumann. [online] Available at: http://lecture.eingang.org/neumann.html [Accessed 1 Nov. 2016].

History-computer.com. (2016). History of Computers and Computing, Birth of the modern computer, The thinkers, John von Neumann. [online] Available at: http://history-computer.com/ModernComputer/thinkers/Neumann.html [Accessed 1 Nov. 2016].