Maniac

What a phenomenal read.

If for nothing else, it made me spend a few weeks trying to understand why I stopped having fun with math so long ago. It ended up being the push I needed to start trying again, and now I’ve been spending at least an hour a day on it for months. So it clearly rekindled something there.

I didn’t know the author, Benjamín Labatut, and now I want to read everything he’s written. It only happens once every other year that I encounter a biography where the storytelling is irresistible, and it usually ranks among my top reads ever. This one fits in nicely with Barbarian Days, Shoe Dog, and The Dream Machine.

The subject of the book is the most interesting part. Arguably the smartest man of the last century: John von Neumann. Jancsi, as he was called by family. Sometimes the hardware (biology) is just unquestionable. A little boy with a huge brain, who learned calculus by age 8. But then there are his obsessions, his curiosity, and even his madness. Dark sometimes, for sure, but intriguing.

Impossibly fun and motivating read. Made me want to get back to math, and to pursue the hardest things in my field that I’m interested in.

It’s somewhat perplexing that he came up with basically the same hardware architecture we have in our personal computers today, right back in 1951, almost as a side project to begin with:

Johnny came up with the architecture. The logical framework. The same one you have on your computer. Hasn’t changed a bit. Wonderfully simple. Just five parts. Input and output mechanisms and three units: one for memory, one for logic and arithmetic, and the control unit — the CPU. It’s really that simple. But it was hell to get it to work.

And on his final days, when the military still wanted to extract as much as they could from that rare brain:

He was the sort of civilian the military simply cannot live without. All the birds and zoomies admired him. Grunts too. So they jacked him up on a massive cocktail of substances and he seemed to get a little better. Right before the end, he woke up, started talking again, and wanted to work… Mrs. von Neumann would have none of it, so she had to be dragged out. She demanded that we leave him alone and let him rest, but the brass said otherwise. To them, the Professor was the goose and the golden eggs.