It is fun, if entirely subjective, to speculate who the greatest people in history are. For example, many consider Wilt Chamberlain the greatest athlete ever — a giant of immense power and agility, who was also a world-class track and field star.
Who is the most innovative scientist ever? An obvious choice would be Albert Einstein, who revolutionized physics in 1905 by publishing four groundbreaking papers: on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity and the equivalence of mass and energy.
But another 20th century scientist deserves serious consideration. John von Neumann, who was born in 1903 in Hungary and died in 1957 in the U.S., never won a Nobel Prize. His accomplishments across multiple disciplines are breathtaking. He had about 125 major scientific innovations.
Von Neumann, who moved to the U.S. in 1930, also was charismatic, lovable, drove fast cars (badly) and was a notoriously hard partier across multiple continents, according to several biographies of him. He died of cancer at age 53 in 1957.
Von Neumann revolutionized one subdiscipline of math and physics after another, while playing a key role in creating game theory and computing. Einstein somewhat pales in comparison, revolutionizing physics as a young man and not innovating significantly the next 50 years of his life despite extensive efforts to create a unified theory of physics.
Here are some of von Neumann's accomplishments:
Mathematics. In his 20s, he revolutionized set theory, ergodic theory and continuous geometry — all major disciplines of theoretical mathematics. A child prodigy, he studied math and physics on the side while pursuing an advanced degree in chemical engineering, to please his businessman father.
Physics. Von Neumann published a set of papers which established a rigorous mathematical framework for quantum mechanics.
