THE MAN FROM THE FUTURE. THE VISIONARY LIFE OF JOHN VON NEUMANN (ADELPHI)

Ananyo Bhattacharya, chief science writer LIMS-London Institute for Mathematical Sciences, autore de L'uomo venuto dal futuro. La vita visionaria di John Von Neumann (Adelphi)

Maria Gaia Fusilli, redattrice VeneziePost

For many, he was the most intelligent being ever to have lived on Earth—an alien perfectly mimicking humans, as his colleagues joked. But who John von Neumann truly was has remained an enigma. The inevitable comparison with Einstein does little to clarify, as the two could not have been more different, especially in their scientific pursuits: at Princeton, while one chased the elusive dream of a unified theory of gravitation and electromagnetism, the other was designing the architecture of the first modern programmable computer—the very architecture we find in our smartphones today. Indifferent to the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics, von Neumann had an almost infallible ability to foresee the fields where his contributions would shape our future: artificial intelligence, cellular automata, game theory, the atomic bomb. He was a genius, yet far from the stereotype of the asocial nerd: a bon vivant who loved parties, Cadillacs, and beautiful women; a man full of weaknesses and ambiguities, as evidenced by his unexpected conversion to Catholicism on his deathbed; a controversial figure, the target of fierce criticism for the extreme cynicism with which he advocated a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. But above all—as Bhattacharya reminds us—he was a mind capable of providing the tools to confront a future from which he seemed to have come, even as he stood ready to return us to the Stone Age.