John von Neumann (1903–1957) was a Hungarian-American polymath who unified the frantic innovations of the 1940s into a single, cohesive architecture. He formalised the “stored-program” concept — the idea that instructions (software) and data should share the same memory.
This “von Neumann architecture” became the fundamental blueprint for nearly every computer built since. He saw that the computer was not just a tool for arithmetic, but a machine capable of simulating the most complex processes of nature and war.