Born as Neumann János Lajos, he is the paradigm of those gifted scientists who were born into middle-class Jewish families in Budapest, grew up in the refined intellectual environment of the same neighbourhood of that city, went to the same high school and then to the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, completed their studies in Germany before fleeing Nazism to settle in the USA, where they all played an important role in the Manhattan project, the first major applied science programme in history.