Two years later, the fifty-two-year-old von Neumann lay dying of bone cancer in Walter Reed Army Hospital, disconcerting his family by converting to Catholicism near the end. (His daughter believed that von Neumann, an inventor of game theory, must have had Pascal’s wager in mind.) “When von Neumann tragically died, the snobs took their revenge and got rid of the computing project root and branch,” the physicist Freeman Dyson later commented, adding that “the demise of our computer group was a disaster not only for Princeton but for science as a whole.”
