Ananyo Bhattacharya - Five Way Interview

Ananyo Bhattacharya holds a PhD in biophysics from Imperial College London and a degree in physics from Oxford University. He has worked as a science correspondent at the Economist, an editor at Nature, and a medical researcher at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in San Diego, California. He lives in London. The Man from the Future is his first book.

Why maths?

I remember my maths teacher in school many years ago being asked by a bored student what the point of maths was. A look of blind panic crossed his face then, after a good deal of hemming and hawing, he mumbled something about checking your till receipt after shopping in a supermarket. Popular maths books are often about fun puzzles or perhaps one person's passionate, otherworldy pursuit of some arcane theorem. I wanted to try something different. My book was an effort to show that maths isn't really about sums or shopping bills. It has shaped the modern world and informs the way we think about everything from nuclear strategy to our own happiness. 

Why this book?

If you want to show how maths has changed our lives, there are few better ways to start than with John von Neumann. He's much less well known than Einstein or even Turing but his impact on our lives is much greater than either. Over the past twenty years or so in journalism, I kept hearing his name more and more often in an astonishing variety of different contexts. This struck me as odd. Von Neumann died from cancer over sixty years ago, aged just 53. So though his name’s faded away from public consciousness, his legacy seemed more important than ever. So what better subject for a book?

Which of von Neumann’s contributions would you say was most significant?

Every computer you’re likely to use from smartphone to desktop runs on the von Neumann architecture. And because von Neumann insisted much of work on building his computer should be in the public domain, he could be considered the father of the open source movement. So I’d have to say his most significant work was in catalysing the information age.

But I think in another couple of decades we might look at his theory of reproducing automata and his extraordinary mathematical proof that machines could reproduce and say that was actually his most influential work, as by then I suspect that either through synthetic biology or nanotechnology we'll have programmable factories that can make copies of themselves.

What’s next?

I'm in the middle of a science fiction novel for kids, which I hope to finish in the next few months. Anyone that's read The Man from the Future or knows something about von Neumann will recognise a few of his ideas in there, assuming it's published!

What’s exciting you at the moment?

The Man from the Future was really a biography of von Neumann's ideas rather than the man. What I'd like to do with my next non-fiction book is to trace a big idea over time, following its evolution through art, philosophy and literature as well as mathematics and physics. That may prove too ambitious but if so, at least it'll be fun failing.

Interview by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a digest free here