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Book Reviewed by:
Danielle McClellan
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From one of contemporary literature's most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI
Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale.
A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake.
The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control.
A work of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.
Excerpt
The Maniac
On the morning of the twenty-fifth of September 1933, the Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest walked into Professor Jan Waterink's Pedagogical Institute for Afflicted Children in Amsterdam, shot his fifteen-year-old son, Vassily, in the head, then turned the gun on himself.
Paul died instantly, while Vassily, who suffered from Down syndrome, was in agony for hours before being pronounced dead by the same doctors who had cared for him since his arrival at the institute, in January of that same year. He had come to Amsterdam because his father had decided that the clinic where the boy had spent the better part of a decade, located in Jena, in the heartland of Germany, was no longer safe for him with the Nazis in power. Vassily-or rather Wassik, as almost everyone called him-had to endure severe mental and physical disabilities during his short life; Albert Einstein, who loved the boy's father as if they were brothers and was a regular houseguest at the Ehrenfests' ...
At once historian, biographer, philosopher, and poet, Labatut is adept at eloquently communicating complex ideas in an accessible but not overly simplified style. The MANIAC will appeal to a wide variety of people, from those knowledgeable about math and physics to those, like this reader, with a decidedly more humanities-based education. Labatut creates fully fleshed actors and brings events from the past into sharp, clear focus...continued
Full Review
(754 words)
(Reviewed by Danielle McClellan).
The title of Benjamin Labatut's novel The MANIAC refers to the computer—the fastest of its kind at the time—developed by the Hungarian American physicist John von Neumann. During the Second World War, von Neumann was a consultant on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he focused on the detailed mathematical calculations needed to design the atomic bomb.
According to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, when the site was first opened in 1943 as a secret lab for creating atomic weapons, most of the calculations were done manually by women, often with degrees in the sciences or mathematics: "The human computers and a collection of IBM punched-card machines conducted the numerical simulations that made it ...
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