From the atom bomb to quantum physics: how John Von Neumann changed the world – Telegraph.co.uk

In embarking on his biography of von Neumann, Bhattacharya sets himself a considerable challenge: writing about a man who, through crisis after crisis, through stormy intellectual disagreements and amid political controversy, contrived always, for his own sake and others, to avoid unnecessary drama. Whats a biographer to do, when part of his subjects genius is his ability to blend in with his friends and lead a good life? How to dramatise a man without flaws, who skates through life without any of the personal turmoil that makes for gripping storytelling?

If some lives resist the storytellers art, Bhattacharya does a cracking job of hiding the fact. He sensibly, and ably, moves the biographical goal-posts, making this not so much the story of a flesh-and-blood man, more the story of how an intellect evolves, moving as intellects often do (though rarely so spectacularly) from theoretical concerns to their application to their philosophy. As he moved from pure mathematics to physics to economics to engineering, observed former colleague Freeman Dyson, [Von Neumann] became steadily less deep and steadily more important.

Von Neumann did not really trust humanity to live up, morally, to its technical capacities. What we are creating now, he told his wife, after a sleepless night contemplating an H-bomb design, is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left. He was a quintessentially European pessimist, forged by years that saw the world he had grown up in being utterly destroyed. It was no mere cynic, though, who wrote, We will be able to go into space way beyond the moon if only people could keep pace with what they create.

Bhattacharyas agile, intelligent, intellectually enraptured account of Von Neumanns life reveals, after all, not a man from the future, not a one-dimensional cold-war warrior and for sure not Dr Strangelove (though Peter Sellers nicked his accent). Bhattacharya argues convincingly that Von Neumann was a man in whose extraordinarily fertile head the pre-war world found a lifeboat.

The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann is published by Allen Lane at 20. To order your copy for 16.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop

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From the atom bomb to quantum physics: how John Von Neumann changed the world - Telegraph.co.uk