John von Neumann

The "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" set out the stored-program principle: instructions live in the same memory as data and can therefore be treated as data. The report circulated with only von Neumann's name on it, which has produced a lasting argument about how much of the content came from the EDVAC team of Eckert and Mauchly.

The architecture's weakness is known as the von Neumann bottleneck: the processor can only fetch one thing at a time across the bus to memory, which is why cache hierarchies exist. Alongside computing he founded game theory with Oskar Morgenstern and worked on the Manhattan Project.