John von Neumann
He founded game theory and the stored-program computer architecture
In 1913 Franz Joseph granted the family nobility with the predicate Margittai—whence the German "von".
He was baptised a Catholic in 1930, aged twenty-six—shortly before marrying the Catholic Mariette Kövesi and a year after his father's death. It is that occasion, the marriage, which is documented; career motives are inference, not record, and may not be attributed. Before his death he received Catholic last rites from Father Anselm Strittmatter; his reported words: "so long as there is the possibility of eternal damnation for nonbelievers it is more logical to be a believer", and to his mother, "there probably has to be a God".
He left Europe between 1930 and 1933 and was a firm opponent of Nazism. It must not be printed that he "converted to escape antisemitism" as a documented motive. Nor that the last rites consoled him: the priest recorded the opposite.
Sources
Scholarship
- Wikipedia, “John von Neumann”; the 1930 baptismal record — the baptism at his marriage; the 1913 ennoblement and the “von”
Basis: documents and evidence.