John von Neumann

A child prodigy born to a wealthy, nonobservant Jewish family in Budapest, from a father elevated to nobility for his services to the Austro-Hungarian empire, János Neumann was a polymath who contributed to various fields in mathematics, economics, physics, and computing. In the 1930s he was offered lifetime professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey, but he also worked on the Manhattan Project, and he coined the term ‘kiloton’ (of TNT) for measuring the explosive force generated.