Neumann, John von (1903–57)

Von Neumann was one of the great mathematical minds of the twentieth century. His work has affected philosophy on several fronts, including logic and the philosophy of science. He also had great influence upon developments in the philosophy of mind: the computer model of mind employed during the middle-to-late twentieth century was explicitly based upon the von Neumann computer architecture. Although late twentieth-century philosophy of mind has largely rejected the von Neumann machine as a model of brain activity, his pioneering work in cellular automata has provided a basis for subsequent development in ‘distributed’ or ‘connectionist’ computer architectures.