Budapest. During the Belle Époque, Janos Lajos Neumann, known in English as John Louis Neumann, was born in Budapest. He would become Johnny von Neumann when he emigrated to Germany. He would be part of the Manhattan Project and would form a group of scientists of Hungarian origin, referred to by the others as “the Martians” due to their strange accent and extraordinary intellect: von Neumann, Leo Szilard, and Edward Teller. And von Neumann would also, and above all, be one of the fathers of computers, information technology, and Game Theory. In the early 20th century, 25% of Budapest’s population was Jewish, as were more than half of the doctors, lawyers, and bankers. Jancsi (as he was nicknamed as a child and as a young man, Johnny von Neumann) adopted the Germanized version of his name, Johann Neumann von Magritta, when he went to Germany (TU Berlin) and then to Switzerland to the ETH Zurich (to escape the first Soviet communist regime in Europe – that of Bela Kun in 1919) and then back to Germany (Göttingen) to study, to then become simply John von Neumann, when he arrived in America.
