He designed and promoted the policy of mutually assured destruction to limit the arms race. At that time he was considered the nation's foremost expert on nuclear weaponry and the leading defense scientist at the Pentagon. He played a key role alongside Bernard Schriever and Trevor Gardner in the design and development of the United States' first ICBM programs. He was also a member of the influential Atomic Energy Commission in charge of all atomic energy development in the country. At the peak of his influence in the 1950s, he chaired a number of Defense Department committees including the Strategic Missile Evaluation Committee and the ICBM Scientific Advisory Committee.

Before and after the war, he consulted for many organizations including the Office of Scientific Research and Development, the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He developed the mathematical models behind the explosive lenses used in the implosion-type nuclear weapon. His analysis of the structure of self-replication preceded the discovery of the structure of DNA.ĭuring World War II, von Neumann worked on the Manhattan Project on nuclear physics involved in thermonuclear reactions and the hydrogen bomb. He was a pioneer of the application of operator theory to quantum mechanics in the development of functional analysis, the development of game theory and the concepts of cellular automata, the universal constructor and the digital computer. He had perhaps the widest coverage of any mathematician of his time, integrating pure and applied sciences and making major contributions to many fields, including mathematics, physics, economics, computing, and statistics. John von Neumann ( / v ɒ n ˈ n ɔɪ m ən/ von NOY-mən Hungarian: Neumann János Lajos December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath.

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