First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC

by John von Neumann

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43 pages, Unknown Binding

First published June 30, 1945

About the author

John von Neumann (Hungarian: margittai Neumann János Lajos) was a Hungarian American[1] mathematician who made major contributions to a vast range of fields,[2] including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, continuous geometry, economics and game theory, computer science, numerical analysis, hydrodynamics (of explosions), and statistics, as well as many other mathematical fields. He is generally regarded as one of the foremost mathematicians of the 20th century. The mathematician Jean Dieudonné called von Neumann "the last of the great mathematicians." Even in Budapest, in the time that produced Szilárd (1898), Wigner (1902), and Teller (1908) his brilliance stood out. Most notably, von Neumann was a pioneer of the application of operator theory to quantum mechanics, a principal member of the Manhattan Project and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (as one of the few originally appointed), and a key figure in the development of game theory and the concepts of cellular automata and the universal constructor. Along with Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, von Neumann worked out key steps in the nuclear physics involved in thermonuclear reactions and the hydrogen bomb.

Reviews

[H Gultiano]

Not into John von Neumann, but I read this to explore the origins of the "brain is a computer" metaphor common in both neuroscience and many people's conception of it. In this tract he lays out the foundation for one of the first digital computers (commissioned for missile and radar systems I believe) and describes logic gates and what is now called the "von Neumann architecture" now, both of which are used in every common computer today.

His model of computational logic was directly based on a metaphor of how neurons work. There are multiple brain derived metaphors throughout the paper, including referring to input as "stimuli", a whole section explaining how binary computation is a simplified version of neuronal firing, clocks in computers being like synaptic delay, and the one most people are familiar with still: memory. The only citation in it is of work by McCulloch and Pitts, who made one of the early mathematical models of neuronal function.

Unless it's related to a more general idea of "computing," the metaphor of brains being computers is kind of a tautology, as computers were inspired by brains. "Computing" before computers was also something people did, and it wasn't the only thing they did, so the metaphor seems to be defining something by a sub-process of that thing

[to'c · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very cool read, even 68 years later and computers as common as dust. Von Neumann's approach to defining computers is completely different from anything I've ever seen current architecture papers. He treats them more as living organisms than as boolean hardware. It's actually a very fast and somewhat light read.