Klara Dan von Neumann

Klara Dan von Neumann , also Klari Dán , née Klára Dán ( August 18, 1911 in Budapest - November 10, 1963 in San Diego ) was a Hungarian - American computer scientist who is considered to be one of the first female computer programmers.

Life

Klára (Klari) Dán von Neumann was born on August 18, 1911 in Budapest , Hungary, as the daughter of Károly Dán and Kamilla Stadler, into a wealthy Jewish family. Her father had previously served as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I , and the family moved to Vienna to escape the Hungarian Soviet Republic of Béla Kun . After the fall of the regime, the family moved back to Budapest. Her family was wealthy and often had parties at which Klára met many different people from different walks of life. At the age of 14, Klára became a national figure skating champion.

She attended the Veres Pálné Gimnázium in Budapest and graduated in 1929. In 1931 she married Ferenc Engel and later in 1936 Andor Rapoch. Klara had previously met John von Neumann on one of his trips back to Budapest before the outbreak of World War II . When von Neumann's first marriage was divorced, Klára divorced Rapoch, married von Neumann in 1938 and emigrated to the United States.

In 1943 she became head of the Statistical Computing Group at Princeton University and in 1946 she moved to Los Alamos National Laboratory to program the MANIAC I machine designed by John von Neumann and Julian Bigelow . She was also involved in the development of new controls for ENIAC and was one of the main programmers of ENIAC. After the death of her husband, Klára wrote the foreword to John von Neumann's posthumously published Silliman Lectures, which were later edited and published by Yale University Press as The Computer and the Brain .

Klára married Carl Henry Eckart in 1958 and moved to La Jolla , California. She died in 1963 driving to the beach from her home in La Jolla and walking in the surf and drowning. The San Diego Coroner office recorded her death as a suicide.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Keith Devlin: John von Neumann: The Father of the Modern Computer. In: Mathematical Association of America. Retrieved August 3, 2019 . 
2. ^ J. Chen, Su-I Lu, Dan Vekhter: Von Neumann and the Development of Game Theory. Retrieved August 3, 2019 . 
3. ^ ^{A b c} George Dyson: Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe . Ed .: Vintage Books. 2012, ISBN 978-1-4000-7599-7 .
4. ↑ Sarah Whitman: Meet the Computer Scientist You Should Thank For Your Smartphone's Weather app. Retrieved August 3, 2019 . 
5. ^ ^{A b} Finding Aid to the Collection in the Library of Congress. In: John Von Neumann and Klara Dan Von Neumann Papers, Library of Congress. 2014, accessed August 3, 2019 . 
6. ^ Norman Macrae: John von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, and Much More . Ed .: Pantheon Books. New York 1992, ISBN 0-679-41308-1 , pp. 170-174 .
7. ↑ Kevin Kelly: Q&A: Hacker Historian George Dyson Sits Down With Wired's Kevin Kelly. In: Wired. Retrieved August 3, 2019 . 
8. ^ Karen Coyle: Turing's Cathedral, or Women Disappear. In: Coyle's InFormation. Retrieved August 3, 2019 . 
9. ↑ Christophe Andrieu, Nando Freitas, Arnaud Doucet, Michael I. Jordan: An Introduction to MCMC for Machine Learning . In: Machine Learning . tape 50 , no. 1/2 , 2003, p. 5-43 , doi : 10.1023 / A: 1020281327116 ( ubc.ca [PDF]).
10. ↑ Klára von Neumann: Preface, Von Neumann Silliman lectures. In: The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews Scotland. Retrieved August 3, 2019 . 
11. ↑ John von Neumann, with a foreword by Paul M. Churchland: The computer and the brain . Ed .: Yale Nota Bene. 2nd Edition. New Haven, Conn. 2000, ISBN 978-0-300-08473-3 .
12. ^ Former Wife of Late Atomic Energy Commission Official Drowns. In: Albuquerque Journal. November 11, 1963. Retrieved August 3, 2019 .