Von Neumann entered government service primarily because he felt that , if freedom and civilization were to survive , it would have to be because the United States would triumph over totalitarianism from Nazism , Fascism and Soviet Communism . During a Senate committee hearing he described his political ideology as " violently anti-communist , and much more militaristic than the norm " . He was quoted in 1950 remarking , " If you say why not bomb the Soviets tomorrow , I say , why not today ? If you say today at five o'clock , I say why not one o'clock ? " On February 15 , 1956 , von Neumann was presented with the Medal of Freedom by President Dwight D. Eisenhower . His citation read : Von Neumann was a founding figure in computing . Von Neumann was the inventor , in 1945 , of the merge sort algorithm , in which the first and second halves of an array are each sorted recursively and then merged . Von Neumann wrote the 23 pages long sorting program for the EDVAC in ink . On the first page , traces of the phrase " TOP SECRET " , which was written in pencil and later erased , can still be seen . He also worked on the philosophy of artificial intelligence with Alan Turing when the latter visited Princeton in the 1930s
Medal of Freedom
Medal of Freedom (1945)
John von Neumann