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Klára Dán von Neumann | |
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 Dán von Neumann photographed byAlfred Eisenstaedt in 1957[1] | |
| Born | Klára Dán (1911-08-18)August 18, 1911 |
| Died | November 10, 1963(1963-11-10) (aged 52) San Diego,California, United States |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
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Klára Dán von Neumann (néeDán; 18 August 1911 – 10 November 1963) was a Hungarian-Americanmathematician,self-taughtengineer andcomputer scientist, noted as one of the firstcomputer programmers.[2][3] She was the first woman to execute modern-style code on a computer.[4] Dán made significant contributions to the world of programming, including work on theMonte Carlo method,ENIAC, andMANIAC I.[5][4]
Klára Dán, known as Klári to her friends and family, was born inBudapest, Hungary on August 18, 1911, to Károly Dán and Kamilla Stadler, a wealthyJewish couple.[6][7][8] Her father had previously served in theAustro-Hungarian Army as an officer duringWorld War I, and the family moved to Vienna to escapeBéla Kun'sHungarian Soviet Republic. Once the regime was overthrown, the family moved back to Budapest. Her family was wealthy, and often held parties where Dán would meet many different people from various stations in life.
At 14, Dán became a national champion in figure skating.[7] She attendedVeres Pálné Gimnázium [hu] in Budapest and graduated in 1929.[4]
After their wedding, Dán andJohn von Neumann immigrated to the United States, where he held a professorship atPrinceton University. Upon immigration, Dán listed her profession as "housewife".[5] However, after theAttack on Pearl Harbor, more jobs for women opened up in the U.S. and Dán was able to secure a position at Princeton.[5] Her title was "Head of Statistical Computing Group".[5] In 1943, J. von Neumann moved toLos Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to work on calculations as part of theManhattan Project. Dán remained at Princeton until 1946, working at the university'sOffice of Population Research.[8] At this time, she was sharing an office withAdele Goldstine.[9] Dán also enrolled in calculus at Princeton in 1947.[9] Both Goldstine and Dán were then contracted to work inLos Alamos New Mexico in early summer of 1947.[9]
And so, after the war, Dán joined von Neumann in New Mexico to program theMANIAC I machine, which could store data, designed by her husband andJulian Bigelow.[4][10][11] This work was entirely novel, a feat that had never been completed before. Dán scored the job, however, due to the belief at the time that programming was menial work, similar to human computing, a job commonly held by women. For decades after this, society would devalue the work of programming, which ultimately allowed women to be a large part of the workforce.[9] More specifically, Dán's job was to translate mathematical instructions into a language the computer could understand. To do this she would look up "codes" - numbers that correspond to instructions for the computer. This is the origin of the word "coder", and the birth of the modern code paradigm. This coding also required her to ask for sections of the machine to be rebuilt, as there was not a clear distinction between software and hardware at the time.[9] She then worked on theENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) on a project with von Neumann to produce the first successful meteorological forecast on a computer. Dán designed new controls forENIAC and was one of its primary programmers.[12][13] She trained a group of people drawn from theManhattan Project to store programs as binary code.[8] During this time she also wrote the code for the first computer simulation of theMonte Carlo method, which is a method to store and analyze large quantities of data and make predictions on everything from elections to COVID-19 trend forecasting.[9]
She taught the meteorologists how to program ENIAC where she managed 100,000 punch cards ensuring there were no data loss.[14] She worked for 32 days on the project, where she saw through and checked the final code.[3]
After her husband's death from cancer in 1957, Dán wrote the preface to hisSilliman Lectures. The lectures were published in 1958[15] and later edited and published byYale University Press asThe Computer and the Brain.[16] She also wrote an unpublished memoir entitledA Grasshopper in Very Tall Grass.[5] In 2022, Dán was the subject of a multi-episode season of theLost Women of Science[17] podcast.
Dán met her first husband, Ferenc Engel, at one of her parents' parties.[5] They wed in 1931.[18] Dán was 19 and described herself as "frighteningly in love." Engel was an avid gambler, and took Dán on many trips to casinos. They were at a casino in Monte Carlo when Dán metJohn von Neumann, whom she would later marry, for the first time. He explained that he had perfected a way to ensure that he would winroulette every time, but promptly lost all his money trying to prove his point. Afterwards, he asked Dán to buy him a drink, a consequential interaction which would set the stage for their long friendship and eventual romance.
Eventually, after a particularly tumultuous trip throughSouthern Europe, Engel's gambling became too much of a problem for Dán and she divorced him.[5] She remarried one month later, this time to Andor Rapoch, an investment banker 18 years her senior.[18] Throughout her marriage to Rapoch, Dán maintained contact with John von Neumann.
In 1938, after von Neumann went through a divorce himself, Dán divorced Rapoch and married von Neumann.[5] Klára and John von Neumann were socially active within the local academic community,[19] and their whiteclapboard house on Westcott Road was one of Princeton's largest private residences.[20]
On August 30, 1939, with the start of World War II looming, Dán traveled back to Budapest by boat to convince her parents and in-laws to leave the country.[5] Her father did not adjust well to leaving his home and factory, and committedsuicide later that year.[5] In June 1942, she suffered a late-termmiscarriage.[5]
In 1955, John von Neumann was diagnosed with metastatic cancer, which may have been caused byexposure toradiation atLos Alamos National Laboratory.[21] He died in 1957.[22]
In 1958, a year after von Neumann's death, Dán married her fourth husband, oceanographer and physicistCarl Eckart, and moved toLa Jolla, California.
Over the course of her four marriages, Dán never had children of her own. Her stepdaughter,Marina von Neumann Whitman (March 6 1935 – May 20 2025), was two years old when Dán and von Neumann married, and grew up to become a prominent economist, automobile executive, and professor of business administration and public policy.[23]
In 1963, Dán drove from her La Jolla home to the beach, where she walked into the surf and drowned. The San Diego coroner's office listed her death as a suicide.[7][24] She was 52 years old.
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