John Von Neumann
was born in Budapest, Hungary on December 28, 1903. He died of cancer, which he developed from working with nuclear weapons, on February 8, 1957in Washington D.C. under military security. He was a mathematician who made contributions to quantum physics, functional analysis, set theory, topology, economics, computer science, numerical analysis, hydrodynamics(of explosions) and statistics. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Budapest at the age of 23. Von Neumann became an American citizen in 1937 and took an interest in applied mathematics. He became a military consultant primarily for the Navy, which led to his involvement in the Manhattan Project. Von Neumann took part in the design of explosives(Hydrogen bomb) and contributed to the development of the Monte Carlo method, which allowed complicated problems to be approximated using random numbers.He is also credited with one contribution to the study of algorithms in 1945 ( the merge sort algorithm). Von Neumann described his political ideology as "violently anti-communist, and much more militaristic than the norm". He was the President of the Von Neumann Committee for Missiles and a member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Von Neumann has a crater on the moon named after him and on May 4, 2005 the United States Postal Service issued the American Scientists commemorative postage stamp series in his name.