The Man Who Fell to Earth

I can't recommend highly enough a biography of John von Neumann, "The Man from the Future," by Ananyo Bhattacharya. The author's appealing style, choice of anecdotes, and mastery of a wide variety of scientific fields make him a skilled and entertaining biographer.

Von Neumann, born in 1903 to a wealthy, titled Jewish family in Budapest, was one of an unparalleled outbreak of geniuses from that doomed demographic cluster, including Leo Szilard and Edward Teller. As Bhattacharya notes, even in such august company, if Teller and Szilard seemed like men from Mars, von Neumann hailed from another galaxy. Later, at the AAAS in Princeton, where he regularly rubbed shoulders with Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel, von Neumann struck contemporaries as the sharpest of the three.

Bhattacharya calls him the Man from the Future because he played the part of Johhny Appleseed in so many new fields. Few mathematicians affected so many areas, from quantum mechanics to the Manhattan Project and the nascent computer business, including some of the first stirrings of interest in the possibility of artificial intelligence. Along the way he planted some of the earliest seeds of political and economic game theory as well as nanotechnology.

Edward Teller was among the many colleagues who marvelled at von Neumann's ability to speak to that crowd's often precocious children. Teller said that von Neumann managed to speak to Teller's 3-year-old son as an equal, and he always rather wondered if von Neumann wasn't communicating with his colleagues by the same technique. He was never unapproachable or condescending, however, but unusually sociable and well-liked.

Von Neumann's father, who saw the writing on the wall even before World War I, insisted that his sons study something remunerative and learn the many languages that would ensure their ability to earn a living in whatever new country they might be forced to adopt. His mother, an accomplished musician, insisted on piano lessons. To please his father, von Neumann enrolled in the University of Göttingen. On the train there, other students, knowing a little of his already promising published career, assumed he would be studying Maths. No, he said, I already know Maths. I'll be studying Chemical Engineering. He excelled by giving it a minor fraction of his attention while he continued to pursue his real interests, including overhauling troubled fields in mathematics. To please his mother, von Neumann took piano lessons. His family wondered why he seemed to do little but play scales, before they discovered he was making appropriate noise while he read a book on the piano stand.

He lived to be only 53, dying the year after I was born.