I want to give this book 4 stars despite the fact that I found it a bit difficult to follow the ideas discussed in this biography. As many other reviews have mentioned, this book is unlike any traditional biographies. The approach of the author is more like describing von Neumann’s ideas, and then quickly followed by more recent findings or further developments to the ideas by other scientists or scholars from other fields who found use of von Neumann’s ideas in their respective fields. Now who is really John von Neumann? Other scientists of his age often jokingly called him The Man from the Future as the title of the book suggests. His fingerprints are everywhere, even on the device I’m using now to type this review. But I only came to know his name while reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Einstein.

John von Neumann was born Neumann János Lanos in 1903 in Budapest to an ennobled Jewish family, for their service to the Austro-Hungarian Empire (the ennoblement happened in 1913). He came to use various aliases throughout his life, such as Johann Neumann von Margitta during his time studying in Germany and later settled with John von Neumann or Johnny when he became an American citizen in the 1930s. As I’ve said above, only few parts of the book actually contain references to von Neumann’s actual life, with a large part of the book dedicated to von Neumann’s ideas. But it’s not without any reason. For von Neumann, ideas might as well be something that describe his life. Ever since his childhood, thinking had become something he enjoyed doing on a daily basis, and he got paid for it (one of von Neumann’s primary motivations in life was reportedly money).

He got famous first and foremost because of his contribution to the field of mathematics, but what makes von Neumann different from other scientists of his time was his way to find wide applications of his theories even in other fields that might not seem related at all to mathematics. The nuclear bombs that were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 were dropped on a certain height above the ground following the calculations from von Neumann reportedly, in order to maximise the impact on the towns below. His other contribution in game theory, now a discipline of economics, was first came into being in 1928 with his publication of minimax theorem that establishes that in zero-sum games with perfect information, there exists a pair of strategies for both players to minimise their maximum loses. Some of his theories would find critics at a later time, but mostly the critics were there in order to complete his theories rather than repudiating them. For example, mathematician John Nash who would be awarded with Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994 developed von Neumann’s foundation on game theory into the Nash equilibrium to define a solution for non-cooperative games with two or more players with often incompatible goals, that finds use in decision makings for large corporations and the military.

As the subtitle suggests, John von Neumann was indeed visionary for his time. The last theory he worked on in the last years of his life in the 1950s was about the theory of automata, which largely explains about a machine or a structure that could replicate itself, something that in time would find its larger use particularly in the development of artificial intelligence, although the term would only be coined by John McCarthy several years later. Von Neumann’s automata theory also found its use in the field of biology, notably inspiring some biologists working in the replication of DNA. The computers and gadgets that we use contain more or less the systems first developed by von Neumann, with regards to the development of algorithms used in the first computer, and also the automata theory that followed. “If people do not believe that mathematics is simple,” von Neumann once said, “it is only because they do not realise how complicated life is.”

I really enjoyed this biography of John von Neumann - even though I knew a fair bit about his life and work already, I learnt a lot. It's really incredible just how much influence von Neumann had on so many aspects of the modern world. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC