2023-05-16 12:15:05
The book. One of the most striking ironies of the XXe century is undoubtedly the way in which Nazi Germany pushed into exile, from the beginning of the 1930s, a number of European Jewish scientists whose contribution against the Axis forces was to prove decisive. John von Neumann, born Janos Lajos Neumann on December 28, 1903, in Budapest, into an ennobled Jewish family, was one of those people who sensed the tragedy to come very early on.
During the Second World War, engaged in the secret atomic bomb project in Los Alamos (New Mexico), he was part of the “Martians”, a group of Hungarian Jews with extraordinary intellectual abilities. There were, among others, Theodor von Karman, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, or even Eugene Wigner, future Nobel Prize in physics (1963). But, for the latter, the unique “Hungarian Phenomenon” was his childhood friend “Jancsi”, future “Johnny” von Neumann.
The biography dedicated to him by Ananyo Bhattacharya, subtitled The man from the future, illustrates the meteoric trajectory of a genius whose contributions shape our lives – whether in computing, economics, automata or artificial intelligence… The book is more thematic than purely chronological, presenting its discoveries in their historical, scientific and geopolitical context. It resuscitates a whole gallery of illustrious scholars with whom von Neumann interacted from an early age.
Let us judge: first scientific article published, in German, at 17 years old. He is only 19 when he proposes a first step towards a solution to a paradox, stated in 1901 by the British logician Bertrand Russel, likely to undermine the foundations of mathematics. In Göttingen, he became a disciple of the pope of discipline, David Hilbert, pursuing parallel training as a chemist. It was there that he met another prodigy, Werner Heisenberg, pioneer of a disconcerting new science, quantum mechanics, also made up of paradoxes. The young man then throws himself into the fray, developing new tools to approach this always confusing underworld.
In 1930, he arrived in the United States, where Princeton and its pool of brains allowed him to flourish. But his conviction that a new conflict was going to tear apart old Europe spurred him on, his fundamental work soon nourishing military applications: explosives, ballistics, computing capabilities, atomic bombs…
The armistice is not a liberation for him: the cold war and its existential perils disrupt his game theory. Von Neumann, unknowingly collaborating with a communist spy, the German physicist Klaus Fuchs, put “unwittingly en route the development of a Soviet H-bomb”note Ananyo Bhattacharya.
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