John Von Neumann | The Man From The Future | Ananyo Bhattacharya
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- Опубліковано 13 чер 2024
- Iain Martin talks to Ananyo Bhattacharya, author of an exhilarating new biography of John von Neumann: the lost genius who invented our world.
The Man From The Future: The visionary life of John von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya (www.penguin.co.uk/books/313/3...)
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.
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#books #vonneumann #mathematics
This genius I think deserves a movie to let people know about his life and extraordinary achievements. I imagine him in the hospital bed, suffering of his condition, mumbling about the brain functioning, and having many flashbacks on his life and career.
Splendid presentation, looking forward to read the book.
Looking forward to reading this!
He may be the smartest man ever walked this planet IMO.
Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, Leo Szilárd and John von Neumann... The Hungarian aliens of that age all worked in the US.
Love the suggestion to set up a reminder for "the man from the future" 😉😁
I read the book and found it to be well written. It does a good job covering von Neumann's ideas. On the other hand, the author ignores a number of disturbing incidents from von Neumann's personal life that call into question his personal morality. It furthermore gives kid gloves treatment to von Neumann's sycophantic relation to the American military, and shockingly, the book almost completely ignores the human consequences of the invention of such important things as the atomic bomb and the invention of AI. Ultimately, I found the author's perspective to be anodyne bordering on naive. Unfortunately, there is much more to von Neumann than this book addresses, and a lot of it is pretty disturbing. All of that is absent from this book.
Ultimately, this book amounts to hagiography.
Not a good start to the vid with the host calling him John VAN Neumann 🙁