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

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