As the Second World War was coming to its end, John von Neumann, arguably the
foremost mathematician of that time, was busy initiating two intellectual currents that
would shape the rest of the twentieth century: game theory and algorithms. In 1944 (16
years after the minmax theorem) he published, with Oscar Morgenstern, his Games
and Economic Behavior, thus founding not only game theory but also utility theory and
microeconomics. Two years later he wrote his draft report on the EDVAC, inaugurating
the era of the digital computer and its software and its algorithms. Von Neumann wrote
in 1952 the first paper in which a polynomial algorithm was hailed as a meaningful
advance. And, he was the recipient, shortly before his early death four years later, of
Godel’s letter in which the P ¨ vs. NP question was first discussed.