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Peter Neumann, a Palo Alto resident whose youthful encounter with Albert Einstein sparked a lifelong passion for computer safety and propelled him toward becoming one of the world’s leading experts in the field, has died at the age of 93.
A Greenmeadow resident who had spent decades as a computer scientist at SRI International in Menlo Park, Neumann is best known for his work on developing systems to improve computer security. He died in May, according to his friends and family.
Born in Manhattan, Neumann was a student at Harvard University in 1952 when he joined his mother, the artist and mosaicist Elsa Schmid, for an important assignment: making sketches of Albert Einstein.
“While my grandmother was sketching, he and my dad were chatting,” said Helen Neumann, Peter’s daughter. “I think that was one of the greatest moments of his life.”
The topic of computer security would remain Neumann’s passion for the next seven decades. According to his obituary in the New York Times, he was one of first programmers at Harvard to have access to a personal computer, a machine that was named Mark IV. He moved to Germany on a Fullbright fellowship, according to Helen Neumann, before returning to join Bell Laboratories, where he focused on ways to correct coding errors.
According to an article in the Communications of the ACM, an industry publication for computer scientists, he fostered “a worldwide community of researchers, historians, and journalists who work to catalog and publicize the risks of computing’s expanding role in daily life.” This included founding a publication dedicated to computer errors and launching the ACM Risk Forum, which was dedicated to computer risks.
The paper notes that his conversation with Einstein informed one of his core tenets: that “complexity in computing is not merely an engineering nuisance but a moral problem, because complex systems hide their failures and harm their users in ways simpler systems do not.”
Neumann and his family moved to Palo Alto in 1971 and lived in a house on Shasta Drive. He worked at SRI, spending 50 years as a senior principal scientist and later a chief scientist, according to CAMC.
While work consumed most of his time, he also loved music and enjoyed practicing tai chi at Cubberley Community Center, according to Helen Neumann. He played the piano and the bassoon and, as a teenager, attended the Greenwood Music Camp, which stoked his love for chamber music.
“That was one the biggest passions in his life,” Helen Neumann said.
Her family lived frugally, she said, and rarely took vacations. She was thus surprised when he announced in 2024 that he would like to make a $4 million donation to the San Francisco Symphony to preserve its chorus. His family ultimately agreed to go public with the gift because it wanted to set an example of an “ordinary guy” who had saved up his whole life so that he could make an incredible gesture in the end, Helen Neumann said.
“He was really altruistic and if he believed in something, he was all in,” Helen Neumann said. “Like with the choir, he really put his money where his mouth was.”
David Moss, a friend and neighbor of Neumann, commended him for his many decades of dedication to his work, which he continued until the very end of his life. Moss, who has lived near Neumann for more than 40 years, said he enjoyed hearing Neumann play music with his friends in the living room, with the door wide open.
At one point, Moss interviewed Neumann about his work for a project about Silicon Valley. He said he was particularly struck by Neumann’s ability to continue working and pursuing new projects until the very end.
“I asked him where he got his ideas and he said, ‘I have projects stretched out into the future and I’ve always had projects stretched out into the future, from the very beginning.’ If one area was taken care of, there were four other areas to go,” Moss recalled. “Most of us wait to be told what to do. He was the one who was always out there, challenging his colleagues to think broadly in these other areas.”
This version corrects typos in a quote attributed to the publication, Communications of the ACM.
Dr. Neumann edited one of the early newsletters, the RISKS DIgest which I contributed to very modestly. Very smart guy, knew the subject from A to Z and α to ω. Sad to hear this news. Prayers and condolences to his friends and family.