My Amazon Review of Ananyo Bhattacharya's "The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann"

 

Genius

 

Something was in the water in fin de siècle Budapest. Out of that community came Nobel Laureates in physics Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner and Leo Szilard, the rocket pioneer Theodore von Karman, and the subject of Ananyo Bhattacharya biography John von Neumann. I would note that the book is more a biography of von Neumann’s ideas rather than a full biography of his life.

 

Von Neumann was born into a very upper-middle class Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary in 1903. He was a child prodigy from the beginning and received his math Ph.D. before he was twenty. The then studied engineering and before he was thirty, he authored "Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics” which integrated Heisenberg’s matrices with Schrodinger’s waves, a monumental accomplishment.

 

But that was only the beginning. He developed Minimax theory and at the Army’s Ballistic Research Lab he became an expert at the trajectory of artillery shells. That led him to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos where developed the implosion lens necessary for the creation of the Atomic Bomb. He also conceived of stored program computer which had yet to be invented. Indeed, his second wife Klara was among the very first computer programmers.

 

Along the way he coauthored with Oskar Morgenstern “The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior” which revolutionized economics and was found to be very useful in business and war strategies, especially concerning the use of nuclear weapons. After World War II he divided his time among Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, Los Alamos’ Weapons Lab, and the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California.

 

While at Rand he instrumental in the development of ICBM’s and he came up with the idea of self-replicating computers. In essence he was the progenitor of artificial intelligence.

 

Bhattacharya tells the story of a true genus who also loved to party hard. My one criticism is that several of the science and math parts of the book can be a real slog for the lay reader.

 

The full Amazon URL is at: Genius (amazon.com)