“The mathematical contributions von Neumann made in the mid-20th century now appear more eerily prescient with every passing year,” Bhattacharya writes, alluding to this book’s excellent title. This is one of several vivid anecdotes recounted in Ananyo Bhattacharya’s “The Man From the Future,” which bills itself as a biography of von Neumann but is more devoted to exploring the ideas and technological inquiries he inspired.
“The trees on the right were passing me in orderly fashion at 60 miles an hour. “I was proceeding down the road,” he would start to say to his incredulous friends when recalling another one of his accidents. Every year he found an excuse to buy a new car, preferably an enormous Cadillac.
Still, von Neumann didn’t let his deep understanding of physics and rational utility get in the way of something else that was clearly very important to him: a love of driving, along with what seemed to be a cheerful commitment to being terrible at it.Īfter leaving Europe in 1933 for a life of the mind at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., von Neumann failed the driving test so many times that he had to bribe the examiner to get his license. As the co-author of one of the first textbooks on game theory, he took a coolly analytical approach to a range of situations that included bluffing in poker and the prospect of nuclear annihilation. The mathematician John von Neumann was an undeniable genius whose many accomplishments included an essential role in the development of quantum mechanics, computing and the atom bomb. THE MAN FROM THE FUTURE The Visionary Life of John von Neumann By Ananyo Bhattacharya Illustrated.