Six hundred metres. The optimal height to ensure that the atom bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused maximum harm. Hungarian mathematician, Neumann János Lajos, or John von Neumann to his US employers, persuaded the architects of the Manhattan Project to detonate the devices not at ground level but in the air to amplify the effects of the blast wave. Von Neumann, dubbed the “smartest human being of the 20th century”, does not feature in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023), but his influence on our age is arguably much greater than that of Nolan’s guilt-ridden destroyer of worlds. Before the after-effects from radiation tests eventually killed him at the age of 53, von Neumann created the modern computer as we know it, laid down the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, oversaw the application of game theory to economic behaviour and laid the basis for the emergence of digital life, self-reproducing machines and artificial intelligence.
In his previous novel, When We Cease to Understand the World (2020) – shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021 - Benjamín Labatut had already begun to explore the troubled interface between rational ambition and moral blindess. Fictively recreating the lives of a group of 20th-century scientists and mathematicians, including Fritz Haber, Karl Schwarzschild, Alexander Grothendieck, Erwin Schrödinger, Louis de Broglie and Werner Heisenberg, Labatut examined the often dire psychological consequences of a brush with absolutes.
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Von Neumann’s particular genius was in marrying a quest for foundational thinking with a vivid sense of real-life applications. He was especially fascinated by the power of mathematics to access all areas. From the behaviour of particles at sub-atomic levels to the decision to buy a second-hand car, there was nothing that maths could not explain. It was mathematics (aided by the exponential power of computing), not industry or politics, that would shape the future of the world.
In Maniac, Labatut’s captivating account of a mind consumed by cognitive possibility but chillingly indifferent to human consequence, the Chilean writer picks through the dark matter of human achievement. Albert Einstein described von Neumann, his colleague at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, as “a mathematical weapon”, a man who would readily sacrifice life to numbers. The feasibility of the hydrogen bomb, for example, was largely proven through the computational capabilities of the machine designed by von Neumann: the Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer, or Maniac.
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Through the perspectives of colleagues and family members, Labatut tells the story of von Neumann’s multiple scientific lives ending with an absorbing account of the defeat of Korean Go master Lee Sedol by an AI application, AlphaGo. The question asked in this remarkably accomplished narrative is whether the 20th century’s smartest human being – a founder of AI – had signalled the definitive end of human smarts. And if so, at what price?
