Neumann

Neumann is a German surname meaning "new man." It derives from Old High German elements meaning a newcomer or someone newly established. The name is common in German-speaking regions and among Jewish communities, and it has variants such as Neuman or Neuman in English-speaking contexts.

Notable people with the surname include John von Neumann, a Hungarian-born mathematician and polymath who made foundational contributions to mathematics, physics, and computer science; Carl Neumann, a 19th-century German mathematician known for work in potential theory and the Neumann boundary-value problem; and Franz Ernst Neumann, a German physicist and mineralogist noted for his contributions to science in the 19th century.

In science and engineering, the name appears in several concepts associated with these figures. The von Neumann architecture describes the design of early computers and their stored-program concept, named after John von Neumann. The Neumann boundary condition, related to specifying the derivative or flux on a boundary, is named after Carl Neumann and is used in partial differential equations and related fields.

Today, Neumann remains a common surname in German-speaking areas and among descendants worldwide. The form without the “von”, Neumann, is typically used outside contexts that emphasize noble naming conventions.