A polymath
Oct. 4th, 2022 08:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: The Man from the Future - The Visionary Life of John von Neumann, by Ananyo Bhattacharya
Von Neumann is one of those names that crops up over and over again in science of the early to mid twentieth century. Reading Bhattacharya's biography goes some way to explaining why. Born into circles with intellectual access in Budapest, he showed early aptitude for mathematics, although his parents weren't entirely sure this was wise and made him study chemistry at university. But it seemed that anything he found interesting, he would excel at, and so his career encompassed, inter alia, quantum mechanics, logic, computers, game theory and automata. During World War 2 he was a significant figure in the Manhattan project, but consulted on many military matters with scientific, mathematical, or operational research input.
Beyond von Neumann himself, some other interesting things emerge from this biography: for example, the effects of depletion of intellectuals from Germany and central Europe particularly in the 1930s, lasting for decades. There is some speculation over whether von Neumann and Turing met during the war, and what information they might have exchanged with each other on the nascent subject of electronic computation (to be honest the evidence is sketchy, and this is very much left as a what if?). The later chapters on game theory and automata do stray rather beyond the area of biography, discussing von Neumann's ideas and contributions in the context of wider surveys of each subject, from the Cold War and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction - or not - through to 3D printers that can copy themselves, and self-building and assembling robots on the moon. It seems, like Mahler's ninth symphony, von Neumann's ideas will always seem modern.
Von Neumann is one of those names that crops up over and over again in science of the early to mid twentieth century. Reading Bhattacharya's biography goes some way to explaining why. Born into circles with intellectual access in Budapest, he showed early aptitude for mathematics, although his parents weren't entirely sure this was wise and made him study chemistry at university. But it seemed that anything he found interesting, he would excel at, and so his career encompassed, inter alia, quantum mechanics, logic, computers, game theory and automata. During World War 2 he was a significant figure in the Manhattan project, but consulted on many military matters with scientific, mathematical, or operational research input.
Beyond von Neumann himself, some other interesting things emerge from this biography: for example, the effects of depletion of intellectuals from Germany and central Europe particularly in the 1930s, lasting for decades. There is some speculation over whether von Neumann and Turing met during the war, and what information they might have exchanged with each other on the nascent subject of electronic computation (to be honest the evidence is sketchy, and this is very much left as a what if?). The later chapters on game theory and automata do stray rather beyond the area of biography, discussing von Neumann's ideas and contributions in the context of wider surveys of each subject, from the Cold War and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction - or not - through to 3D printers that can copy themselves, and self-building and assembling robots on the moon. It seems, like Mahler's ninth symphony, von Neumann's ideas will always seem modern.