1903–1957 · Hungarian-American mathematician and co-founder of game theory
Von Neumann was the twentieth century’s most alarming generalist — a Budapest-born prodigy who did foundational work in set theory, quantum mechanics, computer architecture and weapons physics, often in the same decade. With the German-born, Vienna-trained economist Oskar Morgenstern he wrote Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton University Press, 1944), the book that created game theory as a field. The sentence quoted here comes from its opening chapter, where the two authors explain why economics had not yet earned the mathematics it kept reaching for — not from any recorded conversation.