Number cruncher

The polymath who inspired the character of Dr Strangelove was as brilliant as he was dangerous

Albert Einstein’s recruitment by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, was like a star signing for a football club backed by a Russian oligarch. His presence there soon attracted a stellar collection of mathematicians. The brightest of these was a 30-year-old Hungarian.

John von Neumann was a mathematical prodigy who published his first paper at 18. He was a charming, party-loving, hard-drinking raconteur. He was also capable of chillingly cold calculation, and an attitude to human life in the context of the cold war that can seem breathtaking in its ruthlessness. This real-life model for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove helped usher in the computer age.

There was certainly no doubt about his intellect. Non-Euclidean geometry, game theory and nonlocality are among the astonishing range of topics that Ananyo Bhattacharya covers as

he takes us on a whistle-stop tour through Von Neumann’s restless mind.

With his extraordinary capacity to see beyond the superficial complexities of a problem, Von Neumann reduced quantum mechanics to its essentials, and showed that two competing formulations of the theory – Erwin Schrödinger’s wave mechanics and Werner Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics – were one and the same. It led to him building the first rigorous framework for the new science of the atomic realm.

During the second world war, Von Neumann quickly became an expert in ballistics and explosions. Brought in as a consultant to the Manhattan Project, the top-secret effort to make an atomic bomb, he worked out the best way to detonate it. Solving the equations required extensive number crunching using mechanical desk calculators. Looking at ways to speed up the time-consuming work, Von

Neumann came across the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, a machine being developed for the army to compute firing tables for artillery. You could almost live inside the ENIAC, as it occupied a room 9 metres x 17 metres. Von Neumann helped turn it into the first programmable digital computer.

In an effort to understand conflict and cooperation, Von Neumann co-wrote a book on game theory, which had a huge impact on economics, psychology and military strategy. He applied game theory to nuclear war, openly advocating a pre-emptive strike on the Soviet Union. “With the Russians it is not a question of whether but when,” he told Life magazine. “If you say: ‘Why not bomb them tomorrow,’ I say: ‘Why not today?’ If you say: ‘Today at five o’clock,’ I say: ‘Why not one o’clock?’” He may have been prepared to send humanity back to the stone age but, as revealed in this splendid new biography, Von Neumann did much to create the world we live in now.