John von Neumann

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What Does John von Neumann Mean?

John von Neumann is a renowned Hungarian born mathematician with major contribution in various fields like set theory, quantum mechanics, computer science, game theory, numerical analysis and statistics.

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In the field of computer science, von Neumann is responsible for developing the modern day computer architecture consisting of CPU, ALU, memory, inputs and outputs. He was the first to propose that both instructions and data are stored in the same address space.

Techopedia Explains John von Neumann

Von Neumann has made significant contributions in the field of automata theory in computers and created the first self replicating automata. He is also responsible for the invention of the recursive merge sort algorithm where an array is split into equal halves and the splitting is done recursively to sort data in the final stage and the results are merged to obtain sorted output. The von Neumann architecture for modern day computers was proposed by John von Neumann and incorporated components used in modern day computers like Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU), Registers, Buses, Control Units, CPU and RAM.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.