Works
- Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (with Oskar Morgenstern), Princeton University Press, 1944
- Proposal of a statistical method for neutron diffusion problems, sent to Robert Richtmyer at Los Alamos, 1947
In Thinking Tools
Known for
In Theory of Games and Economic Behavior he and Oskar Morgenstern established game theory as a field and set out expected-utility theory for rational choice under risk. After Stanislaw Ulam saw that sampling many random trials could estimate a probability too hard to calculate, von Neumann turned the idea into a procedure for computing neutron diffusion and, in 1948, ran the first automated Monte Carlo calculations on the ENIAC with Nicholas Metropolis and others.