Benjamin Labatut, The MANIAC New York: Penguin, 2023. Pp. 368. ISBN 978-0-593-65447-7. $28.00 (hardcover).
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: DarrenAronofsky's 1998 surrealist film Pi tells the story of Max, a tortured mathematician driven to madness by his belief that mathematics can offer certain order to the world.The low-budget film that became an unlikely box office success depicts the holy trinity of popular narratives of mathematicians: reclusive genius, madness and religion.Benjamin Labatut's fictionalized biography of John von Neumann is a newcomer to this well-trodden road.Two suicides open the novel.Austrian theoretical physicist Paul Ehrenfest shoots his son and himself in the book's opening line.His compatriot, physicist-philosopher Ludwig Boltzmann, survives just five more pages before taking his own life.These acts of self-destruction foreshadow much of what follows.Labatut is preoccupied with minds coming apart at their seams.These suicides are not responses to a hostile world increasingly characterized by hate, violence and destruction, but instead are driven by the internal turmoil of mathematical minds at work.Madness and religious belief, the author posits, are the only responses of those confronted with the limits of human rationality.Or a more accurate phrasing of the trinity, which Labatut proposes, is that those geniuses who choose to dedicate themselves to science rather than religion inevitably fall into madness when confronted by the limits of reason.A loss of sense emerges from a failure to make sense.Von Neumann's life is narrated through the eyes of those who knew him best.Each chapter is written from the perspective of those who accompany him in his life.Eugene Wigner, George Pólya, Richard Feynman and Oskar Morgenstern are just a few of those who share their memories of von Neumann.The book moves through his childhood and schooldays, early forays into the foundations of mathematics, appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study, work in Los Alamos and interest in early computing.Labatut has a gift for explaining difficult theories in relatable and intuitive ways.The reader is introduced to the foundational crisis in mathematics, Georg Cantor's theory, game theory and the theory of automata, not to mention contemporary machine learningthe focus of the last part of the bookpresented as the culmination or latest incarnation of the problem that occupied von Neumann before his death.Although the narrative is fictionalized, it is clearly based on careful research and deep engagement with the underlying ideas that occupied von Neumann.It is a testimony to Labatut's talent as a writer that he does not simplify theoretical discussions of mathematics while managing to integrate them seamlessly into an engaging narrative.Even historians familiar with von Neumann's life and work will enjoy the book, but to do so they will first have to forget much of what they have learned.
Author: Alma Steingart
Institution: Columbia University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4404191609