Skip to main content

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.





Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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