“The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann”
I am a bit embarrassed to notice that this may be the first “biography” I've ever read. It probably is. I'm not sure.
Perhaps due to that lack of experience on my part, I was expecting something a bit different from this book. I had decided I wanted to read it for one simple reason: to (try to) understand what it's like to be really, really intelligent. I had heard all kind of stories about John von Neumann and about his feats. I wanted to delve into that, try to understand how exactly his brain was so different from a normal one. What it meant for him to be so much smarter than almost everyone around him. How he thought, what “extremely intelligent” actually means.
“As a child, von Neumann absorbed Ancient Greek and Latin, and spoke French, German and English as well as his native Hungarian. He devoured a forty-five-volume History of the world and was able to recite whole chapters verbatim decades later.”
