A Paradigm Is Born

In the ENIAC story so far, John von Neumann has had a fleeting presence. We saw that the BRL formed a high-powered scientific advisory committee at the start of World War II, well before the United States entered the war. von Neumann was a member of this committee and it is unlikely that anyone in the committee was as influential in the American scientific world or, for that matter, in the corridors of power in Washington, DC, than him. By the beginning of the 1940s, von Neumann had a massive reputation in the mathematical universe. His contributions spanned many regions of pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, even formal logic. He was one of the six mathematicians originally appointed as professors at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, when it was founded in 1933—another was Einstein. In 1944, von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern (1902–1977) published a book titled The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, thus founding and establishing for posterity the scientific discipline known as game theory. Herman Goldstine, who came to know von Neumann very well—first through their involvement with the BRL and then, after the war, at the Institute of Advanced Study, where Goldstine went to work with von Neumann on what came to be called the IAS computer project —wrote vividly about von Neumann’s intellectual persona, of his ever-ready receptiveness to new ideas, his responsiveness to new intellectual challenges, his mental restlessness when between projects, and the single-mindedness with which he pursued an idea that captured his attention. Oddly enough, despite his involvement with the BRL, he was apparently unaware of the ENIAC project until a chance meeting with Goldstine in a railway station in Aberdeen, Maryland. Goldstine recalls how the entire tone and tenor of their first conversation, initially casual and relaxed, changed when von Neumann realized that Goldstine was involved with the development of a high-speed electronic computer. There after, Goldstine writes, he felt as he was being grilled in a doctoral oral examination. Thus began their association, a relationship that only ended with von Neumann’s death from cancer in 1957.