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Keywords: Biography, computer science, von Neumann Title: The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann Author: Ananyo Bhattacharya Publisher: Allen Lane ISBN: 978-0241398852 Media: Book Verdict: Recommended.

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John von Neumann was one of the intellectual giants of the 20th century — a giant among giants, but yet he remains little known to the general public. Compare and contrast to Alan Turing for example, who has carved out a place in popular culture. Even John Nash had a Hollywood biopic. Yet von Neumann was a key figure in maths, physics, economics and computer science. The machine you're reading this on has a von Neumann architecture, and is a descendant of the first programmable computers that he helped develop. So it's more than welcome that there's finally a pop science biography of this instrumental figure.

Ananyo Bhattacharya's The Man From The Future is definitely in the pop science mould rather than a more detailed and scholarly work. It's an easy read for the general reader, charting von Neumann's short life (he died at 53, still in his prime) and work, from birth in Budapest in 1903 to early death in Washington DC in 1957. Born into an upper middle—class secular Jewish Hungarian family, he was an archetypal child prodigy, mastering Ancient Greek and Latin, able to accomplish feats of mental arithmetic that astounded adults and devouring volumes of history. He was one of a generation of Hungarian scientists who went on to make major contributions to science and mathematics: Michael Polanyi, Leo Szilard, Eugene Winger, Edward Teller and others.

The book describes von Neumann's numerous contributions to mathematics and science starting with his work, while still a teenager, on set theory and the fundamentals of mathematics. The author always make sure to contextualise von Neumann's work, placing it in the bigger picture to make plain just how central and important much of von Neumann's work was. Along the way one is reminded of the intellectual ferment that marked the first decades of the 20th century. And of course, there are also the wider socio—political currents of the time — the first world war, revolution and, later, the 2nd world war and the fight against Hitler and later the cold war.

Famously, von Neumann was one of the 'Martians' who worked on the Manhattan Project — the small group of Hungarian scientists who had emigrated to the United States during the war. A key designer of the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he remained involved in military work even after the war. Working at the heart of the establishment, he was the cold war theorist credited with the strategy of mutually assured destruction as a way of avoiding a the cold war becoming hot. Much of his work was classified, a move that perhaps limited public knowledge of his work.

In later years his interests also became more focused on computer science, particularly the development of programming, cellular automata, AI and computer modelling. Again, the book covers much of this work and does a good job contextualising and elaborating on it. At times though it's as though von Neumann isn't even present — the book outlines the ideas and some of the other people working on them. It's hard to see the flesh and blood von Neumann emerging from the pages, instead we have a succession of ideas and concepts and discourses on where this work leads. We don't even get to learn much about the cancer that killed von Neumann — not even what type of cancer it was.

It all makes for a fascinating read, and it's eye—opening to see just how wide von Neumann's interests were. However, by the end of the book one is still left feeling that von Neumann was an enigma, it's hard to get a picture of the person. He was a genius, of that there's no doubt, but it would have been nice to have had a clearer picture of the flesh and blood too.