“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.”
Very intelligent people have interested me lately; not so much specific individuals, but in the abstract. I think this curiosity arose mainly from my face-to-face interactions with local members of the Effective Altruism and Rationality communities in the last years: I now know quite well that feeling of struggling to keep up with an impromptu exchange of arguments between two friends, of being the last one at the table to see the ramifications of some new piece of information, of halting for a while to sweat the mental arithmetic necessary to make sense of what has just been said — while others seem capable of merrily bouncing data and ideas all along.
“For […] two hours the men at Rand [Corporation] lectured, scribbled on blackboards, and brought charts and tables back and forth. Von Neumann sat with his head buried in his hands. When the presentation was completed, he scribbled on a pad, […] then said, ‘Gentlemen, you do not need the computer. I have the answer.’ While the scientists sat in stunned silence, von Neumann reeled off the various steps which would provide the solution to the problem. Having risen to this routine challenge, von Neumann followed up with a routine suggestion: ‘Let's go to lunch.’”
But instead of a lineal account of the events in von Neumann's life plus his takes on them, the author serves us a very wide survey of mathematics, physics, engineering and computer science from the beginning of the past century up to today. Almost everything is connected to von Neumann's work in one way or another, but sometimes the link is distant (in time or in space): there are stretches of several pages discussing theories or inventions by some renowned figure or another, and the name of von Neumann appears only to acknowledge that the seeds of those discoveries can be traced back to a paper or a lecture by him, decades earlier.
The book is great in its own way: many of its pages are captivating, as they tell the stories of some of the most fascinating ideas in maths and physics. Game theory, ideas of the infinite, quantum physics, universal computers, automata generating complexity out of the ether, self-replicating machines and artificial life, neural networks and artificial intelligence, or the shocking discovery that mathematics is neither complete nor consistent. The historical backdrop is equally extraordinary: the rise of Nazism and other totalitarianisms, the exodus of European geniuses to the US (especially “Martians” such as von Neumann), the atomic bomb and the Cold War.
And the names! I was delighted to see mentioned so many intellectuals that I admire or about whom I have read a bit: Hilbert, Gödel, Schelling, Schrödinger, Nash, Mandelbrot, Heisenberg, Turing, Wolfram, Russell, Feynman, Dyson, Erdős, Conway, Penrose, McCarthy, Minsky, etc. One of the best things I take from the book is a renewed desire to read about science in general, and about maths and philosophy of science in particular.
Although we get to know the person, his character and his political ideas well enough, we don't get a precise timeline of von Neumann's domestic life and intimate thoughts. Perhaps there aren't enough sources for that — and perhaps a proper biography in that fashion would be boring after all.
There are several hundred footnotes, the majority bibliographical references. But also funny anecdotes, additional explanations by the author and hyperlinks to articles and videos online that provide context or additional depth.
In summary, the book is a bit all over the place, but the protagonist and his contemporaries are so remarkable, the Twentieth Century so fruitful for science, and the author so compelling in his writing, that I don't mind not having read a “proper biography”.