Skip to main content

The Man from the Future - Ananyo Bhattacharya *****

There are very few individuals who have made such wide contributions to mathematical and scientific topics as did John von Neumann. In this splendid scientific biography, Ananyo Bhattacharya introduces to many for the first time both von Neumann's work and life.

It's easy to get the balance between the life and the science wrong with this kind of biography - Bhattacharya keeps it just right, filling in all the biographical details we need, without falling into the trap of giving us endless boring detail of the von Neumann family's background. Similarly, with a couple of small exceptions I'll mention later, the description of his work is at a level that remains approachable with a bit of effort from the reader, yet we are given enough information to see just how important and novel von Neumann's contribution was.

The significantly more famous Richard Feynman is probably the only twentieth century scientist I can think of with the breadth of interests and originality of von Neumann, though approaching things from the viewpoint of a physicist rather than a mathematician. Feynman was a much better communicator, and probably seemed more approachable to someone who wasn't a world class mind than von Neumann - but it's impossible not to be bowled over by von Neumann's breadth of application.

We start off with his work on set theory in pure mathematics, but where von Neumann really triumphed was in applied mathematics. He starts by making a significant contribution to the development of quantum physics and its mathematical basis. He pretty much devises game theory and makes major contributions to its application in various fields. He is a big player in the Manhattan Project, devising mathematical methods to model nuclear reactions and bomb structures. He is instrumental in the development of electronic computers. And he makes large contributions to the concept of self-replicating automata - devices that can produce copies of themselves and hence, effectively, reproduce like living organisms.

One small issue with the book is that Battacharya gets a bit carried away with the automata, spending far too much time on something that still hasn't achieved anything practical, and telling us far too much about others such as Conway and Wolfram who were inspired by von Neumann, but aren't part of his story. The other negative I'd say is that some of the explanations of the mathematics need a bit more detail to be accessible - as stated it's hard to really get your head around what's being described (and that's even in topics I know a reasonable amount about).

However, these small concerns don't get in the way of this being a very readable and enjoyable scientific biography of someone who, outside those working in related fields such as computer science or game theory, has not had the public awareness that he deserves. It's a great addition to the popular science bookshelf.

Paperback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more