Name: The Man from the Future
ISBN: 9781324003991

Ananyo Bhattacharya

A vibrant biography of the renowned scientist and the world he made.

The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann

The Man from the Future

A FINANCIAL TIMES AND TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR

An exhilarating new biography of John von Neumann: the lost genius who invented our world

'A sparkling book, with an intoxicating mix of pen-portraits and grand historical narrative. Above all it fizzes with a dizzying mix of deliciously vital ideas. . . A staggering achievement' Tim Harford
The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Self-replicating moon bases and nuclear weapons. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable man: John von Neumann.

Born in Budapest at the turn of the century, von Neumann is one of the most influential scientists to have ever lived. His colleagues believed he had the fastest brain on the planet - bar none. He was instrumental in the Manhattan Project and helped formulate the bedrock of Cold War geopolitics and modern economic theory. He created the first ever programmable digital computer. He prophesied the potential of nanotechnology and, from his deathbed, expounded on the limits of brains and computers - and how they might be overcome.

Taking us on an astonishing journey, Ananyo Bhattacharya explores how a combination of genius and unique historical circumstance allowed a single man to sweep through so many different fields of science, sparking revolutions wherever he went.

Insightful and illuminating, The Man from the Future is a thrilling intellectual biography of the visionary thinker who shaped our century.

Gavin

An awaited book; in fact I awaited it before I knew it was being written. Here is one of the most important people to ever live, and what notice do we take? Before now: One bad old biography (and one-third of another) and many gigantic maths monographs. Such yawning gaps come from historians and biographers being obsessed with artists instead - consider the nine Jane Austen biographies published in the last 11 years - and our scientists being inarticulate at best. unable or unwilling to stand up for themselves, and unrepresented by the chattering classes. (But a handful of scientists are great writers: Feynman and Dyson and Dawkins and Crick and Pascal and yeah Einstein is quotable and I was actually boggling at some of Gödel’s aphorisms just the other day. Boltzmann is funny.)

It is incredibly difficult to cover everything von Neumann did - everything he did for the first time in history - even just everything with vast practical consequences which are still felt 60 years later. 

Chapter 2: fixing set theory where Hilbert and Russell failed
Chapter 3: unifying matrix and wave theory where Dirac bodged and others failed
Chapter 4: solution to a profound engineering challenge which changed the world forever

Great philosophers get several kinds of books written about them - two are the Life, and the intellectual biography, which actually tries to explain and show the development of their ideas. Bhattacharya’s is more like the latter plus a smattering of parties, fast cars, and intellectual bitching.

Hodges is, in 600pp, just able to enumerate Turing's achievements. Bhattacharya, in 284, is not even vaguely able to begin doing this for vN. Almost no mention of his great work in group theory.

—-

Very incomplete list of von Neumann’s achievements:

* Foundations of maths: Paradox-free foundation of set theory with classes (superceded Russell)
* Physics: Unification of matrix mechanics and wave mechanics (superceded Dirac)
* Physics:: proof of the Ergodic hypothesis
* Lots of group theory, chiefly operator algebras
* Foundations of QM: axiomatisation of QM, unified wave and matrix mechanics.
* Physics: Clarified the measurement problem (for the first time?)
* Physics:: Central work on the Copenhagen interpretation 
* Physics / logic Founded quantum logic
* Economics: Proved existence and uniqueness of general equilibrium 
* Physics: Much-misunderstood constraint on all hidden variable theories. Maybe gappy.
* linear programming: duality and the first interior point method.
* Fluid dynamics: Fat Man implosion lens design. Discovery of the airburst efficiency. Many solutions in blast waves.
* Hardware engineering: Redesigned the ENIAC to be the first stored program computer
* Computer engineering: Earliest partial design of a modern computer. Lifted lots from Mauchly and Eckert (uncredited) but greatly superceded them.
* Patent busting on the digital computer design. Free for all.
* Minimax and dozens of central results in game theory
* Founded utility theory
* Marrying neuroscience and computer science forever
* Founded automata theory
* Intelligence explosion as x-risk
* …

Bhattacharya mentions [EDIT: covers] about half of these.

—-

* The most important question in all of education: How did Hungary produce so many geniuses? Why did they stop? von Neumann’s own answer was the empire’s weird mix of 1) tolerance and rewards for Jewish people, while 2) still being extremely volatile and so making them uncertain how long this would last and so rushing to succeed.

* Bhattacharya’s informalisation of the technical results here is impressive. At least one fuckup though: on p112 he confuses completeness for correctness.

* At one point AB ties the Hilbert and Gödel work to modernism. Modernist mathematics, the rejection of the past, the flight into abstraction and rigour. As if this was a general spirit. I don’t know how to evaluate this idea.

* Sad to hear that a heavily modified ENIAC executed a stored program two months before the Manchester Baby. I hate to see the Man win over the garage nerds.

* Nash is nasty, well before he goes psychotic (self-aggrandising, straw Vulcan, racist). He makes von Neumann look soft and warm.

* Lovelace is not the first programmer. Klári von Neumann has a much better claim, if we insist on ignoring Babbage.

* So many brilliant people here, and far more obscure than JvN. Shapley, Barricelli, Collbohm, Goldstine, Harsanyi, McCarthy, Adele and Klári…

—-

We tend to deify people, and they never deserve it. What did von Neumann get wrong?

Mutually Assured Destruction
It's not obvious that this was a mistake - we're still here, MAD is a strong reason not to intentionally nuke people. But the sheer number of near misses and the overall estimate of 0.1% annual state risk, should make us think that the strategy was actually poor, that we are walking selection bias. 
The less obvious response is that he knew all that and was trading some existential risk to block the Soviet Empire's anti-human practices from taking over. Since this argument also works for the Soviets, or for any value system which values itself, he seems to have settled for an appalling equilibrium. Tragedy of the value lock-in commons.

VN wanted cooperation, wanted a long life for humanity. But he couldn’t trust enough not to escalate. The true altruist cannot afford to cooperate simply.

First strike on the Soviets

  If you say 'why not bomb them tomorrow', I say, why not today? If you say 'today at five o'clock', I say why not one o'clock?
(He recanted this a couple of years later.)

The mistake was twofold: to assume that the Soviets would continue growing, and to assume that the nuclear taboo would not hold. That taboo, that tradition is one of the most precious things in the world, and almost nothing is worth breaking it. To which you reply: 100 million people are not worth it? To which I can only apologise and suggest that 100 million are not worth 300 million.


Trusting Klaus Fuchs
He actually handed the Soviets a new nuke design through the infamous Fuchs.


Nonerror: "Proof" of no hidden variables
The conventional view is that von Neumann screwed up his no-hidden-variables proof, claimed to have shown the impossibility of hidden variables, and that this convinced everyone until Bell came along and exposed the error (30 years after Grete Hermann did it and was ignored). But this misrepresents the proof, which just says that a hidden variables theory will have to have a certain weird structure (which Bohmian mechanics does).

Targeting Kyoto
I don't know if a nuclear strike on Japan was ultimately for the best (considering the appalling toll of the Pacific theatre on both sides, the likely larger toll of taking Honshū, and the second-order effects of showing the world that everything had changed). But that they were civilian strikes seems completely gratuitous. Striking Kyoto, the spiritual centre, in particular seems incredibly high risk.

Nonerror: The brain is digital
People act like he was naive about the brain as computer, but he just wasn’t:

  the brain can prima facie be considered as a digital computer. However, upon further reflection, some elements of analog computing (e.g., the chemistry) will also become relevant in understanding the functioning of the brain.


The von Neumann bottleneck
The world standard architecture for computers leads to a huge waste of CPU cycles, waiting for memory. This wasn't such a big deal in the 50s, but CPU performance has masssively outpaced bus bandwidth over the last 70 years.

Against high-level programming
'von Neumann opposed the development of assemblers and high-level language compilers. He preferred to employ legions of human programmers (mostly low-paid graduate students) to hand-assemble code into machine language. “It is a waste of a valuable scientific computing instrument”, von Neumann reportedly said, “to use it to do clerical work.”.'

Various dumb personal risks
He did not live like someone who understood expected utility and hyperbolic discounting. He ate way too much, drove incredibly badly, was an easy mark for salesmen, pissed off his wife by leching. He spent a lot of time travelling to government meetings. He let others profit from his inventions. These imply irrationality - or a surprising lack of interest in his own wealth, longevity, time use, or marriage. This post collects other apparently bad decisions.

—-

 explores the life of a time-traveler. Someone who theorized, pondered, and invented tools that would create the lives of some and destroy the lives of many. 

 are just some of the many disciplines which von Neumann dabbled. This book explores those wide-reaching fields and the many lives they impacted.

At times during this book, I was a bit lost. Part of that wandering was due to the highly technical chapters that didn't come with any explanation–though I didn't expect much seeing how this book was written by someone with a PhD in physics. But part of that wandering was that this book didn't really explore the "visionary life of John von Neumann" as the subtitle claims. Instead, it explored more of the inventions and fields that the life of John Von Neumann invented. The beginning has the traditional origin story of our main character, but after that, the narrative of his life isn't cohesive. You do, however, learn much about the lives of the people he worked with and the work they produced together.

It was still a lovely read and I want to understand two fields better after reading this: game theory and the birth of the computer. I want to understand how to use game theory to demolish friends at Risk and I'd like a complete understanding of how the 

 and how that lead to the modern computer. To that, I shall continue my exploration of the shelves of libraries that holds the wisdom of the world–all for my taking.

Dalton Mabery

The Man From the Future explores the life of a time-traveler. Someone who theorized, pondered, and invented tools that would create the lives of some and destroy the lives of many. Game theory, quantum mechanics, The Manhattan Project, computers, and the RAND Corporation are just some of the many disciplines which von Neumann dabbled. This book explores those wide-reaching fields and the many lives they impacted.

At times during this book, I was a bit lost. Part of that wandering was due to the highly technical chapters that didn't come with any explanation–though I didn't expect much seeing how this book was written by someone with a PhD in physics. But part of that wandering was that this book didn't really explore the "visionary life of John von Neumann" as the subtitle claims. Instead, it explored more of the inventions and fields that the life of John Von Neumann invented. The beginning has the traditional origin story of our main character, but after that, the narrative of his life isn't cohesive. You do, however, learn much about the lives of the people he worked with and the work they produced together.

It was still a lovely read and I want to understand two fields better after reading this: game theory and the birth of the computer. I want to understand how to use game theory to demolish friends at Risk and I'd like a complete understanding of how the ENIAC created the EDVAC and how that lead to the modern computer. To that, I shall continue my exploration of the shelves of libraries that holds the wisdom of the world–all for my taking.

Nelson Zagalo

Ao chegar ao fim de "The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann" (2021), e tendo em conta a enorme particularidade do intelecto de Von Neumann — aos 6 conseguia fazer divisões com 8 dígitos de cabeça e conversar em grego antigo e latim, aos 8 trabalhava com cálculo diferencial e integral e falava Francês, Inglês e Alemão além do Húngaro, no entretanto leu uma história mundial em 45 volumes e conseguia recitar capítulos inteiros décadas mais tarde —, não consigo deixar de pensar que por mais que endeusemos alguns humanos em particular pelos seus aparentes enormes feitos, o certo de tudo é que estes nada fizeram sozinhos. Ananyo Bhattacharya esquiva-se a falar da pessoa de Von Neumann, centrando-se exclusivamente sobre os seus contributos teóricos. Para esse efeito, trabalha os contributos de Von Neumann para as múltiplas ciências — mecânica quântica, teoria dos jogos, implosão nuclear, arquitetura de computadores e a teoria dos autómatos—, e como esses conduziram no futuro outros a saltos aplicados na história da ciência e tecnologia do século XX. Deste modo Bhattacharya espera demonstrar que Von Neumann previa ou viajava no futuro, contudo, Bhattacharya esquece-se de fazer o mesmo trabalho olhando para o passado, e mais em particular para o lado. Sendo o trabalho de Von Neumann de grande valor, ele não teria existido sem todas as restantes mentes brilhantes com quem se cruzou, de Claude Shannon a Alan Turing, de Einstein a Kurt Gödel, de Erwin Schrödinger a Werner Heisenberg. Este endeusamento pela abstração de ideias pode ser interessante para os colegas das ciências duras, mas eu senti imensa falta do factor humano. Gostaria de ter aprendido mais sobre a pessoa por detrás do modelo usado por Stanley Kubrick para criar Dr. Strangelove, não só pelas profundas contradições morais da sua pessoa, mas também para compreender melhor a base dos seus processos criativos.

Publicado no VI:
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'A sparkling book, with an intoxicating mix of pen-portraits and grand historical narrative. Above all it fizzes with a dizzying mix of deliciously vital ideas. . . A staggering achievement' Tim Harford An exhilarating new biography of John von Neumann: the lost genius who invented our world The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Self-replicating moon bases and nuclear weapons. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable man: John von Neumann. Born in Budapest at the turn of the century, von Neumann is one of the most influential scientists to have ever lived. His colleagues believed he had the fastest brain on the planet - bar none. He was instrumental in the Manhattan Project and helped formulate the bedrock of Cold War geopolitics and modern economic theory. He created the first ever programmable digital computer. He prophesied the potential of nanotechnology and, from his deathbed, expounded on the limits of brains and computers - and how they might be overcome. Taking us on an astonishing journey, Ananyo Bhattacharya explores how a combination of genius and unique historical circumstance allowed a single man to sweep through so many different fields of science, sparking revolutions wherever he went. Insightful and illuminating, The Man from the Future is a thrilling intellectual biography of the visionary thinker who shaped our century.

The Man from the Future The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann

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