John von Neumann, genius

von Neumann is considered one of the greatest and most influential mathematicians of the 20 th century. At mid-century he was asked by the international congress of mathematicians to outline the next 50 years programme, similar to what Hilbert did in 1900. He was regarded as the only person who understood everything. His attempt was somewhat specialised (as recently described in Mathematical Intelligentser). He was rather worried about the domain problems of quantum mechanics, and emphasised the advantages of his theory of continuous geometry. He knew that there, all operators affiliated to a factor of finite type could be added on a common domain. He predicted that this might be how quantum mechanics would solve the problem of perturbing a Hamiltonian. He might yet be right, but this is not how the physicists have solved their models so far.

His work on economics can be found here.