What did John Von Neumann invent?

Answer 1

The mathematician John Von Neumann was involved in several key projects. He was a consultant on the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), designed and constructed at the University of Pennsylvania, which was the world's first general-purpose electronic digital computer. The major credit for the ENIAC however, is generally given to John Mauchly, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, and John Eckert, one of his graduate students. The major drawback of the ENIAC was that it had to be programmed manually by setting switches and plugging and unplugging cables.

The next major advance was the stored-program concept, which is attributed to the ENIAC designers but most especially to von Neumann. The first publication of the idea was in a 1945 proposal by von Neumann for a new computer, the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Computer). The EDVAC was never built, but in 1946, von Neumann and his colleagues began the design of a new stored-program computer, referred to as the IAS computer, at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies. The IAS computer, although not completed until 1952, is the prototype of all subsequent general-purpose computers. So the answer to your question is that von Neumann, with help from others, invented the concept of the store-program computer and then developed (you could say invented) the IAS computer.

Answer 2

John Von Neumann is famous because he was a very versatile polymath. His work ranged from such different fields as nuclear physics, to quantum mechanics, computer science to economics, it was precisely his work on economics which probabely made him famous along with Oskar Morgenstern he created the game theory, his notion of economics being treated as game made a tremendous revolution, and created a proper language to be used on economics means. Before that, many equations were used to explain the economics behavior, Von Neumann proposed the language of the game theory treating economics through «desaguations».

Answer 3

Too many things to tabulate here, he had a long career.