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John Von Neumann

John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. Von Neumann was generally regarded as the foremost mathematician of his time and said to be "the last representative of the great mathematicians". He integrated pure and applied sciences.

It's a maniac!

Von Neumann’s project at Princeton represented reflected a recent surge of interest in computing and its applications in science, technology, mathematics, and weapons manufacturing. The scientists working at Los Alamos—then in pursuit of nuclear fusion weapons—had every reason to join in. In 1951, a team of scientists, led by Nicholas Metropolis, constructed a computer called the Mathematical and Numerical Integrator and Calculator: MANIAC.

MANIAC was substantively smaller than ENIAC: only six feet high, eight feet wide, and weighing in at half a ton. MANIAC was able to store programs, while ENIAC could not. MANIAC’s design was based on the IAS computer, which had originally also been called MANIAC. It therefore used von Neumann’s architecture, making it one of the ancestors of many modern computers.

The “Super”

Although it eventually was used for a variety of purposes, MANIAC’s first job was to perform the calculations for the hydrogen bomb. When Enrico Fermi casually suggested the idea of building a fusion device in the early ‘40s, Edward Teller became fascinated by the idea of designing and constructing a hydrogen bomb. 

Source [excerpt]: https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/computing-and-manhattan-project

Additional Reading:

About the man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann

https://www.techjunkie.com/a-cpu-history/

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