Prof. Dr. Thorsten Jungmann (last updated 2026-10-03)
John von Neumann (1903–1957) was a Hungarian and American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist and engineer. He was born in Budapest, then part of Austria-Hungary. In 1926 he graduated as a chemical engineer from ETH Zurich and, at the same time, passed his final examinations for a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Budapest. In 1930 he went to Princeton University as a visiting lecturer in mathematical physics, and in 1933 he accepted a tenured professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey. He made major contributions to many fields, including mathematics, physics, economics, computing and statistics, and during World War II he worked on the Manhattan Project.
While consulting for the EDVAC project at the University of Pennsylvania, von Neumann wrote the incomplete First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC in 1945. It described an electronic digital computer that stored both its data and its program in the same address space, unlike the earliest computers, which stored their programs separately on paper tape or plugboards. This is the basis of the Von Neumann architecture (German: Von-Neumann-Architektur), which became the basis of most modern digital computer designs. The report describes a central arithmetic unit, a central control unit, a memory that stores data and instructions, an ‘outside recording medium’ and input and output mechanisms.
The architecture bears von Neumann’s name, but historians dispute how far it is his invention: J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the inventors of ENIAC, had already conceived storing instructions and data in the same memory before they discussed the ideas with von Neumann and Herman Goldstine. Turing had described a universal machine with an infinite store for instructions and data in 1936, and Konrad Zuse anticipated storing instructions in the same storage as data in two patent applications of the same year. Because instructions and data share a common bus, an instruction fetch and a data operation cannot occur at the same time. This limit on the throughput between the central processing unit and the memory is called the Von Neumann bottleneck (German: Von-Neumann-Flaschenhals). The Harvard architecture, in contrast, has one dedicated set of address and data buses for reading and writing memory and another set for fetching instructions.
Reference and further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture